ELL News Headlines

Elana Rabinowitz is an ESL teacher and coordinator at Middle School 113 The Ronald Edmonds Learning Center in Brooklyn. In recent years, many of her students have been recent arrivals to the United States — children from asylum-seeking families who fled violence and economic hardship. Some of them had been out of school for months or years as they made their way to the U.S. Rabinowitz wants them to feel comfortable sharing their stories and identities. As soon as a new student is placed in her class, Rabinowitz buys a flag from their country of origin. But she wants them to feel at home in New York City, too, so she decorates her classroom with cozy secondhand furniture she finds at stoop sales. 

When Sonia Águila was in high school, her school counselor told her she didn’t think college was for her, because she was not fluent in English. It would be better, the counselor said, if she found a job to help her parents.

The terminology used to describe students in need of English-language support in schools has evolved over time, with the goal of emphasizing multilingualism as an asset.

For years, Gene Luen Yang was convinced a single character in his groundbreaking graphic novel would doom any attempt at an adaptation. What changed?

Jeff Kim, a world history teacher in Anaheim Union High School District, had long dreamed about how a Korean American studies course could help his students connect with their heritage. But it was the surge of hatred against Asian Americans during the pandemic that made him realize just how urgently the class was needed.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently in Arizona about how English language learners are taught to speak English. But a new picture book for kids takes a different approach to that question.

Seventy miles inland from the Bering Sea, on roadless lands beside the Kuskokwim River, three Yup'ik villages are perfect examples of the educational challenges faced in Alaska. This year, the district was allowed to operate on an academic calendar that's aligned with seasonal subsistence harvests. School leaders spent much of 2022 working to get it approved by the state.

Encouraging Latinx adolescents of Mexican origin to embrace their ethnic pride, cultural values, and connections to their cultural community contributes to positive development and better adjustment during adolescence, a new University of California, Davis, psychology study suggests.

Back in her early days of teaching, Rebecca Bergey thought it was her job as a teacher of English learners to prepare her students with enough language to survive in content area classes. But as Bergey — now a principal researcher at the nonprofit American Institutes for Research — grew in her teaching, she realized that language learning operates at a systems level.

At P.S. 249 in Brooklyn, New York, over 20 percent of the students are English as a New Language (ENL) learners, many of them newcomers to the U.S. The school’s diverse population includes children who speak Spanish, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Ukrainian, and Georgian, and many start kindergarten with little or no English. When principal Elisa Brown first came on board in 2000, the school was using a pull-out model to serve these learners. She quickly noticed that by the time students were picked up from their various classrooms and brought to the specialized language learning teacher, they were getting minimal instruction time—maybe 10 minutes per day. And often, what they were learning was not connected to what was being taught in their regular classroom.