ELL News Headlines

This post is the second in an ongoing series about small teacher moves that have the potential of a big impact on students.

About 23 students from mixed grades were taking a math quiz on exponents at the newcomer center at Thornton High School one recent Friday afternoon. Staffers at the newcomer center work to help students who are new to the country adjust to life in an American high school. As the program grows, students are gaining much more than English lessons. They’re making friends from around the world, engaging in their learning, and getting on a path to graduation. It’s helping them dream of futures they might not have imagined before.

I’ve invited educators to share the three most important — AND most likely to be used — strategies that general education teachers can use to make their content more accessible to ELLs (and everyone else).

Grouping English learners together in classrooms, a longstanding practice in schools, has no impact—positive or negative—on reading development for elementary school students, shows a new study by a team of literacy education researchers.

The distinct and evolving genre merges devices of fiction and poetry with a clear narrative arc — and it’s uniquely compelling to middle and high school readers.

Becca Katz is an outdoor education advocate and teacher. She writes, "The evidence for learning in nature is compelling, robust, and growing. Reduced stress. Improved attention and cognitive function. More physical fitness. Fewer behavioral challenges. Higher engagement. Enhanced cooperation. Better relationships among students and between teachers and students. It even has promising potential as an equity lever. But I fear the autopilot response that drove my students and me indoors is happening across our country post-pandemic. As we’ve returned to “normal,” we’ve forgotten the immediate benefits of learning outdoors."

There are a number of relatively small “moves” we teachers can make in the classroom that have the potential of generating larger positive impacts. A series from last year shared a number of suggestions, and here are even more (two contributors share the same suggestion, so that one might be especially worth paying attention to!).

Indigenous Knowledge Systems are the ways that Indigenous peoples make sense of the world around them, and how they recognize, value, share and use knowledge in their daily lives. The phrase is intentionally plural to honor the diversity of Indigenous nations, of which there are over 600 in the U.S. alone. Generally rooted in place-based knowledge, oral traditions and kinship, Indigenous Knowledge Systems reflect the unique experiences of each community, while sharing common traits.

It's common for Latino Americans to not be fluent in Spanish. According to the Pew Research Center, 24% of all Latino American adults say they can “only carry on a conversation in Spanish a little or not at all,” and 54% of non-Spanish-speaking Latino Americans say they’ve been shamed by other Latinos for not speaking Spanish.

On this edition of Conversations Kelly Yang talks with host Dan Skinner about the the fifth book in the Front Desk series, Top Story. Yang is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of many books for young readers, including the Front Desk series of novels.