ELL News Headlines

Throughout the week, Colorín Colorado gathers news headlines related to English language learners from around the country. The ELL Headlines are posted Monday through Friday and are available for free!

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Best of 2022: Jason Chin's Caldecott Win: 'Kind of a Surreal Experience'

Watercress, a semi-autobiographical story by Andrea Wang, pictures a Chinese American girl and her family in 1970s Ohio. While driving through golden late-summer cornfields in their faded red Pontiac, they pull over to pick wild watercress in a muddy roadside ditch. Back home, they prepare the watercress with garlic and sesame. The girl rejects the greens, which she associates with free meals and secondhand clothes, until her parents share powerful memories of harvesting watercress in China. Illustrator Jason Chin won the Caldecott Medal for his artwork in the book this week.

Best of 2022: Indigenous languages make inroads into public schools

Whenever November would roll around, James Gensaw, a Yurok language high school teacher in far northern California, would get a request from a school administrator. They would always ask him to bring students from the Native American Club, which he advises, to demonstrate Yurok dancing on the high school quad at lunch time.

Best of 2022: How to Use English Learners’ Primary Language in the Classroom

Someone who can communicate in many languages has mental flexibility, an expansive vocabulary, and more. Students in our classrooms with languages other than English in their linguistic repertoires have advantages. The question for us educators is how we tap into that linguistic capital — especially if we do not speak or understand the languages that our students know. How and why do other languages fit into the mainstream classroom?

Best of 2022: How a Puerto Rican folklorist brought bilingual storytime to the New York Public Library

For the past 25 years, the American Library Association has been granting the Pura Belpré Award to young adult and children’s literature that “allows Latinx children to see themselves represented, and for all children to see Latinx protagonists in their books.” But the history of how storyteller and librarian Pura Belpré ended up at the 115th Street branch and her contributions to New York City's public library system are not always taught to younger generations.

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