ELL News Headlines

When Lily Gladstone became the first Indigenous person to win a best actress Golden Globe, she said some words in Blackfeet. Her mother was behind efforts to get the language taught in classes.

A new Netflix documentary shares a slice of southern Texas life as a high school mariachi band makes its way to the state championship. “Going Varsity in Mariachi” shows the journey of musicians from the Rio Grande Valley as they compete and connect via the traditional Mexican folk music. Amna Nawaz spoke with co-director Alejandra Vasquez for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

George Takei was just 4 years old when when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the government to forcibly remove approximately 125,000 people from their homes and relocate them to prison camps around the country. Star Trek actor George Takei has written about this time in his life before — once in an autobiography, then in a graphic memoir, and now in his new children’s book, My Lost Freedom.

Schools are legally required to ensure English learners have access to English-language instruction. They also have an obligation to ensure such students can access core academic content in mathematics, English language/arts, social studies, and science. Yet not all English learners are enrolled in those core courses in their high school years, according to a new research brief. That puts them at risk of falling behind their classmates and not learning the academic skills they need to complete high school.

This rich compilation shares 2024 books from previous Pura Belpré author and illustrator medal and honor winners.  The Pura Belpré Award (opens in a new window), established in 1996, is presented annually to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.

Montserrat Garibay arrived in the United States three decades ago with her mother and sister as an undocumented immigrant, and learned English at a public middle school in Austin, Texas. Later on, she worked as a bilingual pre-kindergarten teacher before becoming a labor organizer in Texas, first representing Austin public school employees and then serving as a top leader of the Texas AFL-CIO. For the past four years, she’s been at the U.S. Department of Education, first as the senior adviser for labor relations to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and, for the past two years, as deputy assistant secretary and director of the department’s office of English-language acquisition.

Black and Latino students in New York City are far less likely to receive an automatic admissions offer than their white and Asian American peers, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of city data.

The Young Adult Library Services Association announced the finalists for the 2025 William C. Morris and Excellence in Nonfiction awards.

Even after publishing four novels, Laila Lalami — the 2023-2024 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute — said she still describes herself as a “guest” in the English language.

The trilingual author grew up speaking both Arabic and French in post-colonial Morocco. Enrolled at a French primary school, her introduction to the written word came via French children’s classics like “Tintin” and “Asterix.” As an English major at Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, Lalami began to resent how early French education had prevented her from developing that initial literary connection to Arabic. 

Rachel Herrera is a physics teacher at Mission High School in San Francisco. In this essay, she writes, "My favorite part of my job is not actually part of my job. As a public high school teacher in a state and district with a teacher’s union, my contract entitles me to a “duty-free” lunch. Over the years, however, I have willingly and somewhat proudly developed a lunch crew."