ELL News Headlines

The San Dieguito Union High School District announced plans to hire three bilingual community liaisons in the coming school year after creating the position to better support English-language learners and their families.

Talk about a storybook ending. Author Jamil Jan Kochai searched for more than a decade for Susan Lung — the second-grade teacher who had changed his life over 20 years earlier. And on Saturday night, in one of those "life is better than fiction" twists, the two were finally reunited at one of his book-reading events.

Violet T. Adams is a 28-year veteran public school educator in Georgia, where she has taught in traditional and alternative schools in grades 6-12. She now teaches in a rural public high school in Gwinnett County.

One way for teachers to facilitate a classroom social and emotional learning (SEL) discussion about beginning-of-school worries is to embed the conversation into a scheduled classroom read-aloud time.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientists have now performed brain-imaging studies of speakers of 45 different languages. The results show that the speakers’ language networks appear to be essentially the same as those of native English speakers.

In this post, award-winning author Erin Entrada Kelly reflects on her childhood. "I was doubtful when my editor suggested I pull from my personal emotional experience to write my own early middle grade collection, with seven-year-old Marisol Rainey — a half-Filipino, half-white girl in pigtails growing up in south Louisiana — as its centerpiece. No one wants to read about a girl who’s afraid of everything, I mused. That’s not interesting. But then I thought about that little girl, little Erin, who wouldn’t even climb a tree, and I thought of all the other kids out there just like her, who think they aren’t brave or interesting. And I realized something: They deserve stories, too. The quietest personality in the room is just as interesting as the loudest."

These 10 Spanish-language and bilingual early readers are perfect for early elementary kids starting to read independently.

When John Chen graduated with his undergraduate degree from a college in China, he knew accounting was not his passion. After a few years in the workplace, he decided he wanted to travel to the United States and pursue a master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages. 

As Daniel Gonzalez grew up in the high desert, the idea of making a career out of studying the environment wasn’t on his radar. After a brief stint at Cal State Fullerton, he headed to community college with no declared major, unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. Then, a couple years ago, Gonzalez took a biology class at Victor Valley College where he learned about how marine organisms are impacted by changing tides. He told his counselor, Manika Record, he’d finally found something that sparked his interest. She immediately recommended him for a summer research program studying environmental science at UC Riverside.