ELL News Headlines

In a large room at St. Andrew’s United Church in downtown Halifax, a piano player pounds out the chorus to a Talking Heads song as a group of 30 people sing along. “If I’m going to sing the wrong note, I’m going to sing it confidently,” choir director Rachel Manko Lutz tells them. This is a lesson for choir singers, but also for English language learners – and almost everyone here is one.

In a high school gymnasium about 20 miles south of Phoenix, a room full of people shift in their seats. The space is silent, with every small creak echoing in the high rafters of the building. No one wants to be the first one to speak. Finally, a tall woman with dark hair stands up and walks to the microphone. She begins in English, but introduces herself in Tohono O'odham. "They call me April Ignacio and I am providing testimony on behalf of my family," she says. In her hands she holds a stack of papers that she reads from.

Social-emotional skills provide adolescents with valuable tools to navigate the tricky world of tweens and teens. But schools tend to focus much more on social-emotional learning in the preschool and elementary years than the latter grades.

West Contra Costa Unified science teacher Olaoluwalotobi “Tobi” Thomas is pursuing his lifelong dream of going to space, and in a way, he’s taking his students with him.

She's a young student in Afghanistan who graduated high school 3 years early at age 15. For years, she's dreamed of becoming an engineer, both to rebuild her country and to prove that women could work in what's often seen there as a male field. M.H., who requested anonymity fearing Taliban reprisal for speaking to the press and criticizing their policy, was inches from reaching her goal this past December. But days after she completed requirements for a civil engineering degree, the Taliban banned women from universities.

As we commemorate the lives and history of Black peoples in the United States this February, SLJ has curated lists of fiction and nonfiction books that can be paired in the classroom to offer a nuanced presentation of major historical events of Black history.

NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks to authors Grace Lin and Kate Messner about their new children's book. "Once Upon a Book" follows a young girl who discovers the joy of reading.

The demographics of public school students are changing rapidly, including in the South. That means school districts must find ways to meet the needs of an increasingly Hispanic and multilingual student body, researchers and advocates say. In Alabama, for instance, the mostly Hispanic English-learner population grew from about 2.4 percent to about 5 percent in the last 10 years. In the Russellville school district in the northern part of the state, English learners now make up a quarter of the student population.

Spend an hour with Cheriese Gipson, and you can't help but get a sense of what she’s like as a preschool teacher. She starts to explain a favorite lesson about mittens and animals, then pauses, disappears off the Zoom screen, then pops back up with a puppet on her hand to continue the discussion. After lunch, one of the 4-year-olds returning to Gipson's classroom pokes her head onto the screen, wanting a hug and a look at whom Gipson is talking to. Speaking in Spanish, Gipson explains that she needs a few more minutes to wrap up the interview.

Over the last decade, the town of Russellville, Ala., has seen a huge growth in its Spanish-speaking population. A quarter of all students in the Russellville City Schools district are English learners. And in the last ten years, the percentage of English-learner students statewide has doubled. In response, the Russellville school district has created a robust English-learner program and hired 10 bilingual aides, funded largely by pandemic relief dollars.