ELL News Headlines

More than 400 refugees and immigrants have come to Gonzaga University to improve their English skills. In many Washington communities, people from Latin American nations are most prominent. And it’s true that there are many Spanish speakers here this week. But Hunter says the groups most represented come from other parts of the world. "I think the biggest pre-registration group this year was from the Marshall Islands, Marshallese. We’ve had before Russian speakers for a long time," Dr. James Hunter, program leader, said.

Two kindergarten teachers will pair up in a dual language immersion program at Waterford Elementary School for the first time in the Goshen Community Schools Corp. The program will be a two-way immersion, which means one teacher teaches all of the English and the other teaches all of the Spanish, according to Waterford Elementary Principal Katrina Overton.

Hoping to fend off a legal challenge to a program that has spared nearly 800,000 young immigrants from deportation, two veteran senators made a long-shot appeal to President Trump on Thursday to support legislation that would put those immigrants and thousands of others on a path to U.S. citizenship. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) introduced "Dream Act" legislation that would grant permanent legal status to more than 1 million young people who arrived in the United States before they turned 18, passed security checks and met other criteria, including enrolling in college, joining the military or finding jobs. Immigrants must have lived in the United States for at least four years to apply. Sen. Graham said the United States faces a "moment of reckoning," stating, "When they write the history of these times, I'm going to be with these kids."

The Santa Barbara Public Library System is the recipient of a $10,000 grant from the California State Library to purchase bilingual books for children. This grant is part of the California Immigrant Alliance Project, funded through the Library Services and Technology Act, a federal program administered by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. These books will be added to the existing bilingual children’s book collections of all branches of the library system, including the Central, Eastside, Goleta, Montecito, Carpinteria, Solvang, and Buellton libraries.

A new study in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition shows an advantage in bilingual children when determining voices of who is talking (talker-voice information).  Countless studies have proven that there are many benefits, in both cognitive and social tasks, so the new findings on recognition of voices by Dr. Susannah Levi add to the growing pile of research in support of bilingualism.

Daniella Suárez is a mathematics instructor, a technology trailblazer at Palm Beach County schools, and a founding IB mathematics teacher at Royal Palm Beach High School in Royal Palm Beach, Fla. She writes, "The United States has often labeled itself a 'nation of immigrants,' yet Americans have always had a tense relationship with other languages, often dictated by politics. We also tend to forget that many 'immigrants' did not cross our borders, but rather that our U.S. borders crossed them."

For decades, researchers have built a compelling amount of evidence that the earlier you introduce a child to a second language, the stronger his or her bilingual skills will be. An infant's brain also appears to benefit from early exposure to two languages. Earlier this year, for example, a team at the University of Washington used neuroimaging to show that bilingual 11-month-olds demonstrated stronger activity in areas of the brain associated with problem solving and self-control. So when the regional government in Madrid, Spain, decided to boost bilingual education for infants there, officials asked the UW’s Institute of Learning & Brain Sciences to develop and test a program to teach a second language to young children whose parents speak only one.

By his own admission, the novelist Junot Díaz is an agonizingly slow writer and a chronic procrastinator. Over the past two-plus decades, he has published just three books: two short-story collections and his 2007 novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which won the Pulitzer Prize. He once spent about five years working on a 15-page story. But even by Mr. Díaz's glacial standards, his latest book, "Islandborn," is long overdue — about 20 years past deadline. And it's a mere 48 pages long.  "Islandborn" is a picture book — Mr. Díaz's first work of fiction for young readers. It grew out of a promise that he made to his goddaughters two decades ago, when they asked him to write a book that featured characters like them, Dominican girls living in the Bronx.

The steps along the road toward bilingualism can help a child's overall facility with language. And early exposure to more than one language can confer certain advantages, especially in terms of facility with forming the sounds in that language. But parents should not assume that young children's natural language abilities will lead to true grown-up language skills without a good deal of effort. Erika Hoff, a developmental psychologist who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and the lead author of a 2015 review article on bilingual development, said: "For everybody trying to raise a bilingual child, whatever your background and reason, it’s very important to realize that acquiring a language requires massive exposure to that language."

An all-girls team from Afghanistan finally reached the U.S. to participate in a robotics competition. Their visas were denied twice by American officials until public pushback prompted President Trump to intervene. Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza talks with some of the girls and Jeffrey Brown discusses how their story plays into wider immigration questions with Alan Gomez of USA Today.