ELL News Headlines

Washington, D.C.'s Capital City Public Charter School feels like a mini United Nations. Many of the school’s 981 students are first-generation Americans with backgrounds spanning the globe, from El Salvador to Nigeria to Vietnam. So when the staff of the literacy non-profit 826DC began a book-publishing project with the junior class, they picked a topic everyone could relate to that also left room for cultural expression: food. Writing coaches asked students to think of a family recipe with a backstory — and then write an essay around that dish. The 81 recipes and their accompanying stories that resulted make up a cookbook of global cuisine with a heartfelt touch, revealing that storytelling may be the most important step in any recipe.

March Mammal Madness was created five years ago by Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University, though now, she says, the competition depends on a whole team of volunteer scientists and conservationists: biologists, animal behaviorists, paleoanthropologists, marine biologists. It's a competition that has been playing out online and in hundreds of classrooms over the past month. Real animals wage fictional battles, while students use science — a lot of it — to try to predict the winner.

Black and Hispanic students with promising test scores are far less likely than similarly skilled white students to be enrolled in college-level classes in Palm Beach County's public high schools, a disparity that school district leaders blame in part on "implicit bias" in the schools.

Seattle and Beijing-based publishing company Candied Plums, the children’s book imprint of Paper Republic LLC, has entered the American market with a list of 20 contemporary English and bilingual picture books from China. Candied Plums publisher Richard Lee launched the company in December 2016, after seeing an increased market for Chinese-language books, particularly in schools and public libraries.

Teacher Kathleen Melville writes, "When I met my students on their first day of high school, most of them were not readers. They knew how to read, but they thought of reading as teacher-mandated drudgery. Some of their indifference to the written word could be attributed to the drill-and-test regimen common in urban elementary schools. After nine years as students in these schools, my students are very familiar with isolated 'passages' and multiple-choice comprehension questions and much less acquainted with books that inspire curiosity or reflect their experiences. But the problem extends beyond school policy and begins before kindergarten; the lack of children's literature that is representative of urban children, people of color, and the wide diversity of society is well-documented. And it means that most of my students have come to know books as largely irrelevant to their lives."

March 31 is Cesar Chavez's birthday and a holiday in California, Colorado and Texas. The Los Angeles Times has republished his obituary along with photos of Chavez from the archives.

Jolly Ntirumenyerwa ran her fingers over the stethoscope that she had slung around her neck. It was a comforting connection to her career as a physician in her home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she worked in emergency medicine. Now, thanks to an unusual program that is training immigrants to become emergency medical technicians, she is preparing to make better use of her medical background and, she hopes, work her way up to becoming a physician assistant if not, someday, a doctor. But the program goes beyond helping Ms. Ntirumenyerwa (pronounced t-roo-may-YAY-rwa) achieve her personal career goals. It is also helping to address some serious problems in Maine, including a shortage of E.M.T.s.

Chris Powers will serve as the next executive director of TESOL International Association, the organization for teachers who specialize in working with English-learners. The Alexandria, Va.-based organization has 12,100 members and 115 affiliate organizations around the globe. Powers is the director of the Education Abroad Programs Division at the Washington-based Institute of International Education where he oversees efforts that support language education from kindergarten through graduate school in 37 countries.

Muslim children are more likely to be bullied in school than children of other faiths. A new survey by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) reveals that 42 percent of Muslims with children in K–12 schools report bullying of their children because of their faith, compared with 23 percent of Jewish and 20 percent of Protestant parents. These results confirm recent findings by other research and advocacy groups showing that bullying of students of color is on the rise.

As on other campuses, students at the University of Utah have been calling for the school to declare itself a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, including those enrolled there. While the fate of undocumented students is still up in the air, and the effectiveness of promises at other universities to provide them sanctuary still untested, the attention to the issue in Utah and elsewhere has resulted in something much less widely noticed that could also have a big impact: Long-sought additional support is finally being added on campuses to help these students succeed in college.