ELL News Headlines

Today’s post is the first in a series by the authors that will appear throughout the school year. Their posts will address the question: How can teachers support middle and high school challenged readers?

Sahira Larios is a public school kindergarten teacher in a bilingual Spanish-English classroom in Oak Grove School District in San Jose, California. In this interview, she describes how she builds strong partnerships with multilingual families.

Can acts of kindness make a difference in the lives of others? As an instructional technology coach, I have worked with fourth-grade teachers for the past seven years to transform abstract themes of empathy and compassion into concrete learning experiences.

For Bris Marcellus, the path to Boston was not straightforward. Economic reasons pushed him to flee his home country of Haiti to Brazil. But in Brazil racism made him flee again. Marcellus is just one of thousands of Haitian migrants who have arrived in Massachusetts over the past two years. Massachusetts is home to 80,000 Haitians — the third largest Haitian population in the United States — and over half of that population is estimated to live in the Boston area.

A new report released by the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center explores the role of Hispanic-serving community colleges in California and offers suggestions for how they could better serve Latino students.

The first week of school highlights yet another facet of the challenge Chicago faces in supporting newly arrived migrants: enrolling their children in school. For the past two days, I saw it up close while helping two migrant families enroll their daughters at a neighborhood high school in Brighton Park.

In my work with North Korean refugees and their children, I have found that the latter group, who are mostly born in hiding in China, naturally pick up Chinese during their time there. When these children escape China undetected and arrive in South Korea, they are faced with the daunting obstacle of assimilating to South Korean society. These children are uncomfortable with the fact that their first language is Chinese, their mother is North Korean, and their new life is in South Korea. While younger students may struggle with their Korean skills or Chinese accent, older students have learned to see their bilingualism as an asset rather than a barrier, pursuing careers such as interpretation, international trade, and politics, where it gives them an advantage as a unique spokesperson of South Korea, North Korea, and China.

The Sacramento-based James B. McClatchy Foundation decided to spend all its funds by 2030, a process known as “sunsetting” in the nonprofit sector. A major beneficiary of this strategy, already in motion, are advocacy efforts that support the education of the many Central Valley students who speak a language other than English at home.

The $445 million Fiscal Year 2024-2025 supplemental budget passed by the Maine Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Janet Mills in July will direct $3.5 million in state funding to school districts in order to assist English Language Learner (ELL) students.

At the emergency shelter at War Memorial Gym in Wailuku, Alejandra Ramirez saw many Spanish speakers in need of translators. The Wailuku resident said a group of Latinos, including Mexicans, Cubans and Argentinians, lost their homes to the wildfires in Lāhainā.