ELL News Headlines

In this post, award-winning author Erin Entrada Kelly reflects on her childhood. "I was doubtful when my editor suggested I pull from my personal emotional experience to write my own early middle grade collection, with seven-year-old Marisol Rainey — a half-Filipino, half-white girl in pigtails growing up in south Louisiana — as its centerpiece. No one wants to read about a girl who’s afraid of everything, I mused. That’s not interesting. But then I thought about that little girl, little Erin, who wouldn’t even climb a tree, and I thought of all the other kids out there just like her, who think they aren’t brave or interesting. And I realized something: They deserve stories, too. The quietest personality in the room is just as interesting as the loudest."

These 10 Spanish-language and bilingual early readers are perfect for early elementary kids starting to read independently.

When John Chen graduated with his undergraduate degree from a college in China, he knew accounting was not his passion. After a few years in the workplace, he decided he wanted to travel to the United States and pursue a master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages. 

As Daniel Gonzalez grew up in the high desert, the idea of making a career out of studying the environment wasn’t on his radar. After a brief stint at Cal State Fullerton, he headed to community college with no declared major, unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. Then, a couple years ago, Gonzalez took a biology class at Victor Valley College where he learned about how marine organisms are impacted by changing tides. He told his counselor, Manika Record, he’d finally found something that sparked his interest. She immediately recommended him for a summer research program studying environmental science at UC Riverside.

For the three decades leading up to 2020, the rate of Latinos enrolling in college was steadily rising. But when the COVID pandemic began, those numbers took an immediate hit.

Desiree Tran talked about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with her seventh graders at McFarland’s Indian Mounds Middle School in the spring. A few months later, she was teaching English in a classroom near the Poland-Ukrainian border to a mix of 12-15-year-old Ukrainian and Polish students affected by the ongoing war. Tran’s trip last month was through the American Federation of Teachers, for which she filled out an application and was one of 15 teachers chosen to be part of the experience and the only one from Wisconsin.

During the summer, Larry Ferlazzo is sharing thematic posts bringing together responses on similar topics from the past 11 years. This post shares advice from veteran teachers to new teachers.

More than 1,700 colleges and universities so far are not requiring students to submit SAT and ACT scores when they apply for admission for fall 2023, only a slightly lower number of institutions than in the previous admissions cycle.