ELL News Headlines

After nearly twenty years of mandatory English-only education, California’s bilingual schools are growing because of family demand.

Today’s post wraps up a multipart series offering suggestions about how teachers can help students see that lessons are relevant to their lives outside of school.

Much like the preschoolers he spent 10 years teaching, Daniel Mendoza embraces big messes. One of the first things students saw when they came into his classroom was a drippy, paint-splattered canvas. Now, he teaches other educators how to unleash the power of creativity in the classroom. Some teachers are afraid of making a big mess, but he relishes it. Mendoza, who grew up on a pistachio farm, seeing nature as his playground, believes that children are naturally artists. They love to get down-and-dirty, and they often focus more on the process than the product. Sometimes a child will concentrate so hard on a piece they seem to lose themselves in the work, only to run off as soon as it’s finished.

According to the Migration Policy Institute National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, nearly one million immigrant students enrolled in U.S. schools in the 2020-21 school year. Newcomer students are typically immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers who have recently arrived in a new country and are entering the school system for the first time. At Oakland International High School (OIHS), welcoming and supporting these students isn’t a new challenge; it’s the very foundation of their mission.

Denver Public Schools is setting ambitious goals for Latino students, families, and employees in response to a report from earlier this year that highlighted “serious barriers” to their success.

Positive attitudes toward school and access to dual-language immersion programs are associated with better academic performance among English learners. Learning in overcrowded classrooms and having a disability, meanwhile, are characteristics associated with lower reading scores among this growing subset of the student population.

Teaching multilingual students about Greek and Latin roots in words can help them systematically build their knowledge of English.

Vowing to uplift student voices, Anely Cortez Lopez was sworn in as the Los Angeles Unified School District school board student board member on Aug. 13 — the second day of the 2024-25 school year. Lopez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, said that from a young age, her mother would take her to town hall and neighborhood meetings where she would often help translate for her mother. That was where she quickly developed a passion for civic engagement — which has morphed into college plans for studying political science, with an emphasis on public health. 

California published a guide for how districts should serve English learners seven years ago. It’s called the English Learner Roadmap Policy, and it’s largely seen as groundbreaking. But many districts still haven’t used that road map to change their practices, advocates say.

Sandra Hernandez knows what a struggle it can be for students to learn English while in high school. She’s been raising four multilingual children, including a 17-year-old niece who just returned from Mexico to live with her in Durango in southwest Colorado.