ELL News Headlines

ESL teachers at a high school in Hawaii believed a poetry project would help their language learners express themselves. The school has now self-published the collection of poems.

The percentage of English-language learners who graduated from Rhode Island's public high schools on time fell to 71.7 percent for the class of 2018, the third straight year that the state's fastest-growing student population has seen a decline in its graduation rate, the state announced Friday. The downward trend in outcomes for English learners — their graduation rate was 77 percent in 2015 — comes as policymakers continue to craft a long-term plan to improve performance metrics in Rhode Island schools.

The measles outbreak continues to spread in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 695 cases. That's the highest number since 2000, when measles was declared eradicated in the U.S. There are now cases in 22 states, but the largest outbreaks have been in New York's ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Now a story of how measles spread from there to another community hundreds of miles away, and how local health officials are partnering with that community to address it.

TESOL International Association has pledged its support for the bipartisan Reaching English Learners Act (H.R. 1153, S. 5​45). The legislation would create a grant program for colleges and universities under Title II Part B of the Higher Education Act to support the development of teacher preparation programs that train future teachers to instruct ELs.

The teenage dancers twisted and twirled across sheets of plywood in the basement of the First Baptist Church of Astoria on Wednesday, waving their skirts and stamping their nailhead-packed Spanish dancing shoes in a Mexican polka. On May 3 at the Liberty Theatre, the Mi Cultura Folkloric Dance Group will perform several traditional Mexican dances as part of a Cinco de Mayo celebration.

The new question-of-the-week is: "What are the biggest challenges facing Native American students and how can they be addressed?" Today's responses are written by Timothy San Pedro, Alayna Eagle Shield, and Amanda Holmes.

Immigrants bring a wealth of languages to the United States, and when teachers value those languages, children learn better – and everybody benefits, an MIT linguistics professor said at the College of Education's spring symposium. "Now there's clear recognition that students are better off when they can maintain or learn a second language," said Prof. Michel DeGraff. "Language is wealth. We need to find ways to nurture that."

The Supreme Court is debating the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census. But communities with a high number of Hispanic and immigrant families are not waiting for a decision and are putting money and resources into ambitious, targeted campaigns to ensure families fill out the census forms.

The Trump administration is proposing to tighten regulations to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing federally subsidized housing, a move that low-income housing advocates fear will keep immigrants who are legally entitled to such benefits from receiving help.

An estimated 98,000 undocumented students graduate from U.S. high schools each year, but those graduates remain "at risk of deportation and will face severely limited opportunities to pursue further work and education," according to a new report from the Migration Policy Institute.