ELL News Headlines

Tennessee Republicans want all students to verify their citizenship, residency, or immigration status as part of an aggressive immigration package they say was developed with the White House. But there were no details on how exactly the policy that top GOP leaders rolled out on Thursday would play out inside Tennessee schools.

Incorporating peer review and individual reflections makes frequent, intentional formative assessment manageable, with big benefits for student learning.

For more than 30 years, English learners in New York have taken the paper-and-pencil New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test to measure their English-language proficiency. Beginning next school year, that will change. New York’s English learners will instead test with WIDA ACCESS, a digital assessment currently used by 35 states and the District of Columbia, and five federal agencies and territories.

Today’s post kicks off a series on scaffolding instruction for students. This first column in the series focuses on scaffolds for English learners.

When Kelly Yang recently finished a draft of a book, she called fellow author Kate DiCamillo. Normally, these are joyful conversations between two friends who share a craft and a passion for reading and writing. But she and DiCamillo are “doers,” Yang said, so as the discussion headed toward despair, the question became: what were they going to do about it? Yang proposed a podcast, and StoryKind was born.

This technique gives multilingual students explicit instruction on how to effectively develop their ideas for each part of a paragraph and to link one idea to the next.

The Minneapolis school district closed all schools a day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a woman in the city this week, and federal law enforcement agents later arrived at a high school, where clashes between agents and civilians ensued, according to local reports.

As English language arts teachers, we’re always trying to find ways to build student comprehension with grade-level texts in reading and listening. We’re also trying to support our students with their ability to write. A language dive is especially useful in this effort. In a language dive, we take a juicy sentence from a text and utilize it to support students’ understanding of the main ideas while they learn different types of language and ultimately model writing. One of the most challenging things about a language dive is that students may not know all of the words or concepts in the chunks they’re deconstructing.

In her award-winning entry for NPR's Student Podcast challenge, Ameya Desai interviews her grandfather, Kishor Desai, whose family migrated from India to Uganda, where Kishor was born and raised. His father worked at a sugarcane factory outside of Uganda's capital, Kampala.

Stories explaining federal policy shifts and guides on how to best teach this diverse group of students were some of the top topics on EdWeek readers’ minds when reading stories this year about English learners.