The Reading Teacher, 61(6), pp. 440–448 © 2007 International Reading Association DOI:10.1598/RT.61.6.1 ISSN: 0034-0561 print / 1936-2714 online D avid stretches his hand high above his head, anxious to ask Jesus a question. (All teacher and student names are pseudonyms.) Ms. Page’s combination first- and second-grade class has just read the “news” that Jesus narrated earlier to a pair of peer “reporters.” The story dealt with a particularly gory eye gouging: Jesus’s father, a landscaper, had been hit in the eye by a stick while trimming some trees. David, motioning as if pulling out his eyeballs, asks enthusiastically, “¿Tu papá, se le salían así los ojos?” (Your dad, did his eyes pop out like this?) Jesus, pointing to his right eye, responds with equal enthusi- asm, “No. ¡No más este!” (No, only this one!) During two years of research in two primary-grade English immersion classes of Spanish-dominant Latino students, I frequently observed this type of fervent en- gagement in the classroom activity known as daily news. During each day’s production and sharing of the news, the students eagerly related, scribed, edited, read, and, as in the case above, negotiated understandings of the events that filled their lives outside of school. Furthermore, the activity created an ideal context for the teachers, Ms. Page and Mr. Grant, to foster the students’ language development, provide explicit instruction and meaningful practice in various writing skills, and pro- duce supplemental reading texts that captured their in- terest. Given the fact that literacy instruction for English-language learners (ELLs) tends to focus on drill and practice of decontextualized skills (Fitzgerald, 1995; Gutiérrez, 2001; Neufeld & Fitzgerald, 2001), daily news What’s Your News?: Portraits of a Rich Language and Literacy Activity for English-Language Learners Patrick Manyak The daily news activity provides a connection for students between home and school, enriching their learning and validating their experiences. stood out as a meaning-centered instructional activity that drew on students’ diverse language resources and created space in the classroom for their unique out-of- school experiences. Consequently, I consider daily news, as I observed it in Ms. Page and Mr. Grant’s class- rooms, a valuable example of rich language and literacy instruction for ELL students. In this article I use tran- scripts of actual classroom interactions to create de- tailed portraits of key aspects of daily news. These portraits provide concrete examples of the type of prin- ciples for teaching ELL students that are often present- ed in abstract, summary, or hypothetical fashion (Fitzgerald, 1993; Lenters, 2004; Mohr, 2004). In the following section, I provide a backdrop for understanding the dynamics of daily news by dis- cussing important insights from previous research fo- cusing on language and literacy instruction for linguistically diverse students. Next, I briefly describe the classes in which I conducted my studies. I then of- fer a series of glimpses into the nature of daily news in the two classrooms, calling attention to the ways that it facilitated the students’ language and literacy learning. Finally, I conclude by highlighting the important les- sons that this portrait of daily news offers with regard to constructing rich instruction for young ELLs. Rich Instruction for Young English-Language Learners Recent research has demonstrated that children can acquire initial literacy in a language they are just begin- ning to speak (Fitzgerald & Noblit, 1999; Geva & Zadeh, 2006; Lesaux & Siegel, 2003). Furthermore, several of these studies have shown that the basic processes of children learning to read in a second language parallel those of children learning to read in their first lan- 450