ELL News Headlines

Often, when we talk about the city of Chicago — and its school system — we hear about too much violence and too little money. Jeffrey Brown talks to poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera about his new project, which gives Chicago students the opportunity to create meaningful works about their lives and the challenges they face. "We have got to let our students' lives, all their lives, not just part of their lives, express itself in as many ways as possible. And where else are they going to get that openness and freedom? In what other area in school? Maybe there's other areas, but, for sure, poetry," says Herrera.

Reyna Gordon was an aspiring opera singer fresh out of college when she began contemplating the questions that would eventually define her career. Today, Gordon is director of the Music Cognition Lab in the Department of Otolaryngology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She studies the connections between rhythm and grammar, and how rhythm and music training might help children with atypical language development.

The growing population of English learners (ELs) in U.S. schools has left teachers underprepared to effectively support their unique linguistic and academic needs. As noted in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) standards and Diane Staehr Fenner’s Advocating for English Learners, technology can provide meaningful adaptations to support content instruction and language development for ELs. Tools such as infographics, digital word walls, and digital storytelling are all effective for building background, deepening understanding of language and content through multiple and varied interactions, and promoting collaboration and communication — all important indicators of ELs’ success in mainstream classrooms.

While a record number of states are providing public preschool, 43 plus Washington D.C. and Guam, inequality has grown over the last decade, as access to pre-K and the quality of the programs themselves vary significantly from state to state. A total of 1.5 million children, including 32 percent of 4-year-olds and 5 percent of 3-year-olds, were enrolled in preschool this past year. Several states are now offering or moving towards universal pre-K, which serve all kids regardless of income, including Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, District of Columbia, New York, Iowa, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Maine. Seven states provided no state-funded preschool programs and eight states continued to enroll fewer than 5 percent of 4-year-olds. "In essence, because some states are moving so far ahead, your ZIP code matters way more than it did in 2000," said Dr. W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, adding that, "It's good news for some children and bad news for others."

A Canadian journalist who arrived in Canada as a refugee says there should be more links between Canada's refugees and Canada's Indigenous people. Pakistani Canadian Sadia Rafiquddin says there are more similarities between the two groups than differences.

Shakopee teacher Amanda Marek said it all started when her school district noticed a problem: some of the district's students who grew up speaking Spanish were not doing very well in Spanish class. They were also falling behind in classes taught in English. So Shakopee started a class called Spanish for Native Speakers.

A first-of-its-kind national survey sought to examine the state of foreign language education in primary and secondary schools, but found a striking "lack of knowledge about foreign language teaching and learning." Coming on the heels of an American Academy of Arts & Sciences report that concluded that the United States —with its mostly monolingual residents —could face social and economic disadvantages in an increasingly multilingual, global society, the surveyors were only able to collect data from 44 percent of the nation's high school and 38 percent of K-8 schools.

One state is signaling the growing importance of bilingual skills by touting its young people who are fluent in more than one language. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recently signed into law a bipartisan bill establishing a Seal of Biliteracy program, which recognizes high school graduates who are proficient in a second language. The legislation takes effect during the 2017-18 school year, and school district participation is voluntary.

If you know anything about New Orleans public schools, you probably know this: Hurricane Katrina wiped them out and almost all the schools became privately run charters. The thing is, students across New Orleans face high rates of exposure to trauma, but school discipline policies have rarely accounted for that. Crocker College Prep is now one of five New Orleans charter schools in a collective to become more trauma-informed. That means Crocker aims to account for the social, emotional and behavioral needs of all students, and their lives outside of school.

One morning early in his freshman year at Cornell University, Ahmed Ahmed got a writing assignment back, flipped it over and stared at the letter in shock: C+. He went to his biology class, where the professor displayed a large graph showing the distribution of the grades for the exam, for which, like the writing assignment, Ahmed had studied really hard. The average was 85, with a very small deviation. He got his exam, turned it over: 69. He walked quickly to a lake near campus, wiping away tears. Even with his always-laughing, perennially optimistic personality, Ahmed couldn’t help but realize that despite everything he had done to earn a spot at Cornell, and how much a degree from the Ivy League school could transform his own life and his family’s, hard work might not be enough.