ELL News Headlines

The U.S. has nearly 41.8 million Spanish speakers, giving it the fifth-largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, according to data from Spain’s Instituto Cervantes. In Texas, where roughly 40 percent of residents are Hispanic, nearly 1 million students in public schools are English learners who speak Spanish at home.

An Iowa principal who put himself in harm's way to protect students during a school shooting earlier this month died Sunday, a funeral home confirmed. Caldwell Parrish Funeral Home & Crematory confirmed the death of Perry High School Principal Dan Marburger after the family announced it on a GoFundMe page.

Nancy Frey, Alejandro Gonzalez Ojeda, and Douglas Fisher create an environment to ensure belonging for multilingual learners in schools and classrooms.

Today’s post on Larry Ferlazzo's Education Week blog is the second in a series on the hot-button issue of differentiated instruction.

WIDA, the consortium most educators may know for its language-proficiency test used for identifying English learners in close to 40 states, is moving more into professional development programming for all teachers who work with English learners — including those in general education classrooms.

Since the COVID pandemic, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of young children who are slow to develop language skills, with pediatric speech delays more than doubling for children aged 12 and younger. PBS Wisconsin's Zac Schultz reports on what’s behind the delays and whether schools have the resources to help teachers, students and caregivers.

A team of researchers and teachers from Nevada and Pennsylvania are developing a new science literacy curriculum for English language learners. The goal is to better teach EL students science vocabulary in middle school.

According to a study recently published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, people who speak two languages may be better at shifting their attention from one thing to another, compared to monolingual speakers.

Cursive is making a comeback amid concerns that learning to use a keyboard had superseded handwriting skills that are important for intellectual development — and also that a new generation of students could not write or read the flowing words of historical documents, old letters and family recipes.

On a sunny but brisk November afternoon inside Robert Abbott Middle School, six eighth grade girls quickly filed into a small but colorful classroom and seated themselves in a circle. At the 50-minute WOW circle, girls have a chance to set aside the pressures of the school day, laugh with and listen to one another, and work through personal problems. The weekly meeting is the centerpiece of individual and group therapy that WOW offers throughout the school year to Black and Hispanic girls, and to students of all races who identify as female or nonbinary, in grades 6 to 12.