ELL News Headlines

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.

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.

A defining moment in Tia Javier’s life was when her 3-year-old daughter was having difficulty communicating. Javier knew she needed to find a speech therapist who spoke Spanish, but she didn’t realize how hard it would be. 

In 2016, Shabana Basij-Rasikh created Afghanistan's School of Leadership for girls. When the Taliban took control in 2021, she helped her students flee and continued their education abroad.

Donna Barba Higuera is still "a deer in the headlights" over her 2022 Newbery Medal, truly stunned by the recognition of her novel The Last Cuentista. It is the first book to win the Newbery and the Pure Belpré Youth Author award.

The paths Leslie Torres-Rodriguez and Madeline Negrón took to lead Connecticut’s Hartford public schools share important similarities—and the end results seemed unlikely when they themselves were students in the state’s schools.

For school-aged children and teens, their formative years changed all but overnight in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The jobs of social workers who work with youth and the roles of school counselors also changed in a flash as the professionals grappled with how to safely help those coming of age in a time of global crisis.

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?

A group of 12 parents stood inside the Glendale-Mountain View Community Learning Center's learning lab in Salt Lake City Friday morning waiting to receive their diplomas. They were the latest cohort to graduate from the Padres Comprometidos program.

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.