In the News Blog

India's Outcasts Put Faith in English

India: Dalits are building a temple in honour of a language they believe can liberate them from the oppressions of the caste system.

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Language Testing Rules Criticized as Unrealistic

Tennessee: Shuler Pelham spent Wednesday morning trying to explain to a 15-year-old Mexican boy why he should come to school. The teen arrived in Nashville in March, attended one week at Overton High in August and then disappeared. A truancy court ordered him back to Overton.

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U.S. Plan to Replace Principals Hits Snag: Who Will Step In?

United States: The aggressive $4 billion program begun by the Obama administration in 2009 to radically transform the country’s worst schools included, as its centerpiece, a plan to install new principals to overhaul most of the failing schools.

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Update on ESL: An Interview With TESOL Executive Director Rosa Aronson

Recently, TESOL Executive Director Rosa Aronson spoke to Education Talk Radio's Larry Jacobs about the state of K-12 English language teaching in the United States and the upcoming TESOL Convention in New Orleans, March 16-19, 2011.

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Business English Speakers Can Still Be Divided By a Common Language

United States: Business is the most popular subject for international students in the United States. At last count, twenty-one percent of foreign students at American colleges and universities were studying business and management.

This article contains commentary from Thomas Cossé, a professor of marketing and business at the University of Richmond in Virginia, and Kay Westerfield, member of the TESOL board of dIrectors and director of the international business communication program at the University of Oregon.

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GOP Governors Take Aim at Teacher Tenure

United States: Seizing on a national anxiety over poor student performance, many governors are taking aim at a bedrock tradition of public schools: teacher tenure.

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Education Funders Group Calls for ELLs to Be High Priority

United States: If philanthropists want to see education improve in this country, they need to focus more on the needs of English-language learners, an influential group of funders says in a report released today.

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Foreign Students Focus on Business, Engineering Studies in US Schools

United States: U.S. colleges and universities have seen a tremendous increase in international students studying business and engineering in recent years.

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American Voices, Far From Home

Georgia: The former Soviet republic of Georgia is trying to improve the quality of the English instruction in its classrooms with a program that has hired 1,000 people from the United States, Canada and other English-speaking countries to teach in its schools. Here are three teachers’ observations so far.

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Still Fighting Russia, This Time With Words

Tblisi, Georgia: The new teacher who arrived recently at School No. 161 could barely speak a word of the Georgian language, knew little about local customs and easily got lost in the crazy-quilt streets of this hilly capital. But she was at the forefront of one of the most notable educational initiatives — if not social experiments — being attempted in the former Soviet Union.

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Education Secretary Launches United States Education Dashboard

United States: The U.S. Department of Education today launched a new website that provides convenient and transparent access to key national and state education data, highlighting the progress being made across the country in every level of the education system and encouraging communities to engage in a conversation about their schools.

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Sudan Needs English to Build Bridges Between North and South

Sudan: Whether the country decides to split or not it will need a neutral language to continue the peace process and to speak to the rest of the world.

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My Students Help Assess My Teaching

United States: "Today is an opportunity for you to challenge and push me to become a better teacher, and a time for you to challenge and push yourselves to be better learners." So I began my ninth-grade English class one day before the winter break.

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Latino Applications Surge at U. of California

United States: If current trends continue, Latino students will soon make up a plurality of applicants to the University of California, surpassing Asian-American and white students within a few years.

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The Ideas Shaping a New India

India: This new year will bring the 20th anniversary of that shimmering, amorphous thing, the new India.

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