ELL News Headlines

My first grade multilingual learner asked for help with an assignment that required reading the word and matching it to the corresponding picture. I assumed that my student had not read it. My student replied, “I read the word, but I don’t know what it means.” At that moment I realized that my students were decoding but not understanding what they read.

When school districts decide how English learners will receive language support and access to grade-level content, the default is often to group these students together during the school day. But new research suggests that approach may not work for all students.

Today’s post is the first in a three-part series offering some potentially helpful advice about the following question:

What is your advice to educators about how to teach during these chaotic times?

Over the last four years, Dr. Shelly Engle has partnered with preservice teachers and local schools to transform nearby trails, campus green spaces, and community sites into standards-aligned STEM learning environments for elementary school students.

We Need Diverse Books announced the 2026 Walter Dean Myers Awards. The Walter Awards are given in two categories: Younger Readers (ages 9-13) and Teen (ages 13-18). And the 2026 winners are: Younger Readers Winner: The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze by Derrick Barnes; Honor Title: All the Blues in the Sky by Renée Watson. Teen Winner: Champion by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld, and Ed Laroche; Honor Title: King of the Neuro Verse by Idris Goodwin. The 2026 Walter Awards ceremony will be held on Monday, March 23, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.

As Olympic Fanfare played, students entered Amanda McCoy’s library confused. McCoy didn’t normally play music in the library. But wait — this song sounded familiar. In truth, McCoy is about to start a multi-day unit that uses the Olympics to teach research and infographics.

Last year, Susana Beltrán-Grimm was visiting Hispanic families for a research project about parents and math, when she started to notice a trend. Parents didn’t want to talk about math with the Portland State University professor. Instead, they wanted to talk about their fears as immigration enforcement ramped up across the country. These comments led Beltrán-Grimm to launch a small pilot study looking at how parental stress and fear around immigration enforcement was affecting children, and specifically, their opportunities to play. Her initial findings painted a clear picture: Parents were so fearful of immigration enforcement, they were avoiding taking their kids to playgrounds and parks.

This week, 330,000 Haitian immigrants who’ve lived and worked in the U.S. legally, sometimes for decades, were set to lose their immigration protections. That’s after the Trump administration announced it would end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haitians on Feb. 3. After a federal court order on Monday, the program remains in place for now, but could still be undone. The administration says it will appeal the ruling, potentially to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Accounts from detained families, their lawyers and court filings describe the federal detention center in Dilley Immigration Processing Center as a place where hundreds of children languish as they’re served contaminated food, receive little education and struggle to obtain basic medical care.

A study published in Scientific Reports challenges longtime notions about how deaf children learn to read.

Vanderbilt Health researchers report that many prelingually deaf children who use cochlear implants (CIs) achieve age-typical language and reading comprehension, even though their ability to process speech sounds is reduced.