ELL News Headlines

Howard Bell, CEO of ABL, writes, "In high school, I was the only student of color in all but one of my advanced classes. Except for my time on the basketball team and some joyful moments in study hall, I didn’t see my friends from the neighborhood at school. I created a term to describe this experience:'academically alone.'"

As the battle against book banning attempts continues across the country, School Library Journal and Penguin Random House have partnered with PEN America, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Council of Teachers of English, FReadom, and Library Journal to create a poster that promotes free expression and supports the fight against censorship.“Open Books, Open Doors,” with original artwork by award-winning illustrator Rafael López, features a child stepping into a larger-than-life book that transports them into a beautiful new world.

Welcome to one of the more hope-filled, albeit cautious, Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Months in recent history. Plenty remains unsettled, challenging, and tragic, but a glass-half-full outlook extols the news that the world is finally, excitedly opening up from the last two-plus years of pandemic isolation. For the APA community, that reemergence comes with vigilance following the alarming surge in anti-Asian hate crimes. As antidotes to and balms against racism and phobias, stories can help soothe, support, and strengthen.

Growing up in Los Angeles as the daughter of Mexican immigrants, Liz Contreras used English and Spanish, but she also expressed herself with Nahuatl, an Indigenous language spoken in central Mexico since the seventh century. She just didn’t know it. "My family is from a small pueblo in the south of Mexico," said Contreras, a master’s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "I grew up learning Spanish with Nahuatl incorporated into our Spanish here and there, except that I thought I was just learning Spanish."

A classroom full of toys, puzzles, costumes, books, flags from around the world and energized children is a place Clementine Gasimba gravitates toward. What makes this particular preschool classroom unique is the children — among them, they speak up to 10 different languages. Knowing half a dozen languages herself, Gasimba can speak and relate to many of the children, but still has a few she teaches who she doesn’t share a common language with. Gasimba is one of several teachers at The Little Village, an early childhood center part of an organization called The Village Institute. The Village Institute aims to serve refugee families from a holistic approach, providing housing, language resources, childcare, job readiness, and mental health services, all under one roof.  That includes a pipeline where refugee women, including Gasimba and Harriet Kwitegetse, can go through education and certification courses to help advance their careers. In this case, the training put Gasimba and Kwitegetse directly back into serving other refugee families by leading a preschool class. 

As North Carolina’s demographics continue to diversify, the state’s community colleges are also becoming more diverse. Colleges are finding ways to encourage enrollment among students from different backgrounds and represent their heritage, customs, and native languages in classrooms.

Rochester Public Schools English Language Learners, or EL Learners, got a chance to learn more about math and science in a fun, interactive way this past week.

For many teachers of English learners, working with students to build oral language skills has been especially crucial this year.  That’s because remote learning made those skills harder to practice last year. A report released this month detailed some of the common challenges: Students had fewer opportunities to talk with their classmates online, and teachers who specialized in language support often got pulled away to help with other duties. The charts and word banks that students rely on as they learn to speak a new language were harder to share in virtual classrooms, too.

In the last two years, Canada and several U.S. states have begun to recognize their histories with Native American boarding schools, institutions that set out to “assimilate” Native American children into westernized U.S. ways of life by stripping them of Indigenous tradition and culture. What would start with a small number of schools following the Indian Civilization Fund Act in 1819 would eventually grow to more than 350 “government-funded, and often church-run” schools across the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

Fewer students are choosing language electives at school, but contrary to popular perception, it isn't purely a lack of interest causing the decline. My recent study suggests students want to study a language, but can't.