ELL News Headlines

Leveraging students’ home languages in the classroom with tools like translation can help make students’ stories visible. In doing so, learning a new language becomes fun for students.

A rise in post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses. Young children clinging to teachers in classrooms. School absences that turn into drops in enrollment as families leave town, and sometimes the country. These are among the mental health effects school counselors, therapists, and researchers say they are seeing nationwide as immigration enforcement activity has intensified in the country’s interior over the last year.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Judith Larson’s daughter was in sixth grade in Los Angeles Unified School District. The family waited months for a school computer and internet access, so that she could join classes online.

Amache, or the Granada Relocation Center, represents the kind of difficult American history that many teachers are wary of broaching in the classroom: it was one of 10 sites where the U.S. government imprisoned tens of thousands of its own citizens during World War II. Addressing it wasn't popular back in the 1990s either, when teacher John Hopper first had his students send questionnaires to survivors. Under the leadership of teacher Hopper, the site and its stories have for more than three decades had an unusual set of caretakers: his high school students.

The top California education official renewed his call to return a deaf 6-year-old who was deported with his mother and younger brother to Colombia.

When COVID-19 wrought havoc on society in early 2020, today's youngest schoolchildren were infants or yet to be born. Now in their early school years, researchers are beginning to see how the pandemic years have shaped their education, even though many had yet to set foot in a classroom when it began.

A few months before her daughter started kindergarten, Claire Benoist saw a Facebook post that stunned her. Another family with an incoming kindergartner was wondering if it was true that children in the Croton-Harmon School District, 45 miles north of New York City, receive an iPad when they start school. 

An 18-year-old Memphis student is being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center after he was detained on the way to a school soccer game just over two weeks ago. Yasser Jose Lopez Soza was riding in a car with teammates to the soccer game on Feb. 20 when the driver was pulled over for a traffic violation, Soza family attorney Jay Paul Fearnley said this week. Fearnley said Soza’s case was caused by a “perfect storm” of local immigration crackdowns and changes in federal policy.

As the number of English learners has surged, the growth in the number of teachers with specialized training hasn’t always kept pace. That means general education teachers who want and are expected to help English learners in mainstream classrooms aren’t trained in how to work with these students, nor do they always have access to co-teachers with expertise.

Coding can help students understand the building blocks of world languages, and it provides an authentic way to tell stories.