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Supporting multilingual learners—by supporting their families

Woman smiling in front of a brick wall, surrounded by colorful illustrations of a turtle, toucan, book, and nature, with the word "¡Hola!" at the top left—celebrating technology in the math classroom and boosting the performance of students.

Teachers know that multilingual/English learners (ML/ELs) are an important and fast-growing population in today’s classrooms. In 2021, more than 10% of students enrolled in public schools across the U.S. were identified as English language learners, with some projections suggesting this number could reach 40% by 2030.

But when it comes to partnering with the families of ML/ELs for student success, we’re just beginning to tap into what’s possible.

I’m an ML/EL teacher and former homeroom teacher at a school serving many ML/ELs.

Here’s what I’ve learned about best practices for bridging the school-to-home communication gap and partnering with families (all families!) to ensure their child’s success.

Recognizing the communication gap: Common challenges with multilingual families

In my experience, three common barriers can stand in the way of strong family engagement and student success:

  • Cultural expectations around parent-teacher communication: In many cultures, school is considered the teacher’s domain. Reaching out may be seen as crossing a line—or simply not expected at all.
  • Logistical challenges: Unpredictable schedules may lead to missed messages, delayed responses, or inconsistent availability.
  • Language barriers: If a message isn’t in a language a caregiver understands, it’s unlikely they’ll respond—not because they don’t care, but because they can’t fully engage.

Supporting multilingual learners starts with recognizing these barriers not as signs of disconnection, but as invitations to shift our approach. There are best practices we can adopt to help bridge the gap—and build the trust and relationships our students need to thrive.

Tools and strategies for better parent-teacher communication

If you want to communicate with families who speak a variety of different languages, the first step is finding the method of contact that works best for each of them. My school uses an auto-translating app called ParentSquare for home communications—but not all families I’ve worked with respond to ParentSquare messages. So if a family isn’t responsive to one mode of communication, try another!

It’s a good idea to ask families on Back-to-School Night—or whenever your students first arrive—if they have a preferred mode of communication. I’ve found I get the best response rate by creating a Google Voice number and communicating via text, first translating through an app if needed.

Keep a log of this information so you have it on hand when you need it. In the long run, this will be easier for both you and your students’ caregivers than you chasing them down to get them to download, log into, or check a specific app.

The important thing is to consider making contact essential, and to keep trying until you find the mode that works for both you and the parents of your ML/EL students.

Setting the tone for strong family engagement

If you want to forge a strong family-school partnership (and you should!), you also need to set the tone. When families have a different cultural understanding of school engagement than what you’re used to, I’ve found that it helps to explicitly solicit parent input, explaining how a partnership between caregiver and teacher will help support their child’s success.

Let them know how and why they should get in touch with you, and make it easy by reaching out proactively with brief, positive updates.

What multilingual families really want to know

Perhaps most importantly, ask families what they want to know! I’ve attended many parent-teacher conferences—both for my own students and as an interpreter—and I’m frequently struck by how many multilingual families respond when I ask what questions they have. Many families who haven’t previously reached out are suddenly overflowing with questions.

The most common one I get is how they can support their child’s academic journey at home. Parents also frequently request updates about behavior. Understand that just because a family isn’t asking these questions proactively doesn’t mean they don’t care. When I explicitly ask parents what they need, their responses make it abundantly clear that they are deeply invested in their child’s schooling and success.

I’ve also learned that many families—especially those who speak a language other than English at home—may not know that there are many ways to support their child’s growth, even if classroom instruction is not in their home language.

Think about what tips and resources you can most easily provide: Do your students’ parents know that reading or reciting poems, songs, or chants in their home language helps literacy growth? Could you send home simple board games from the classroom to reinforce key skills? Would signing up for a library card give them access to resources they didn’t know were available? Many caregivers of ML/EL students have told me they lack the tools to get involved—but are eager to engage once given tangible strategies.

How teachers can go the extra mile

In order to give our students and their families the support they need, it’s critical that we challenge our internal biases and assumptions. If we assume parents are uninterested or uninvolved, we avoid an opportunity to think creatively about how to bridge communication gaps and facilitate family involvement. We also cut off a world of possibility for our students and limit their access to the academic success that comes from parent involvement.

Working with the families of ML/ELs may bring added responsibilities—but it’s also a unique privilege, full of new opportunities. In teaching ML/ELs, I’ve found that I get to be a cultural bridge—one of the people providing warmth, stability, and welcome to families navigating a new culture. School can be overwhelming in a new country or different language—but a teacher who goes the extra mile can ensure success for both students and families.

Additional resources

Empowering multilingual learners

Welcome back to Science of Reading: The Podcast!

For most teachers, it’s no longer a question of if you’ll have a multilingual learner in your classroom, but rather a question of how many, and what languages they bring with them. While the Science of Reading can help all learners, its insights should be applied differently when students are learning a home language as well. The more we’re able to read, the more we’re able to learn.

—Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan

In this episode, Susan Lambert is joined by Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities presented when teaching multilingual learners how to read. Dr. Cárdenas-Hagan is a bilingual speech-language pathologist and certified academic language therapist who serves as director of Valley Speech Language and Learning Center in Brownsville, Texas. In this episode, she discusses how teachers can make connections between students’ home languages and English in order to celebrate their language and give them new tools to better understand English. She also stresses the importance of teachers educating themselves on their students’ home languages so they can spot orthographic and phonological similarities and differences. She also highlights the importance of educator collaboration for student success.

Listen now!

For more wisdom and research on the best ways to teach reading, subscribe to Science of Reading: The Podcast.

Found in translation–the power of cross-linguistic transfer

¿Verdadero o falso? You must be bilingual to support emergent bilingual students in their literacy development.

¡Falso!

An essential component of supporting emergent bilinguals in developing literacy is understanding cross-linguistic transfer (CLT): when emergent bilinguals use knowledge of one language to support learning another.

Educators do not need to be fluent in both languages to identify—and teach—which elements of one transfer to the other.

“Teachers should not feel discouraged in supporting their students who are Spanish-speaking, because there are ways that they can still support cross-linguistic transfer without actually speaking the language,” says Amplify senior PD strategist in biliteracy Lauren Birner.

But CLT doesn’t just happen—it requires explicit instruction. So we do need to ensure that this takes place if we want to support equity in education, especially in early childhood education.

How can educators bring the power of CLT into instruction? And support equity and excellence in education?

Making connections: The impact of CLT

Our recent webinar Making Connections: The Importance of Cross-Linguistic Transfer in Biliteracy Instruction—led by Lauren Birner and Amplify’s Kajal Patel Below—explored answers to these questions.

In the webinar, Birner and Patel Below describe similarities and differences between English and Spanish, discuss how those similarities and differences can impact instruction, and explain why CLT helps English learners leverage skills from both languages to build their biliteracy.

They also underscore why it matters—namely, that it’s about supporting equity in early childhood education and beyond.

More than 15% of our K–3 students in this country are emergent bilinguals, and we have a responsibility to help them cultivate and expand that superpower.

—Kajal Patel

The Simple View of Reading and biliteracy

The idea behind the Simple View of Reading is that the combination of language comprehension and word recognition is what leads students to gain meaning from text. If either language comprehension skills or word recognition skills are lacking, students cannot become skilled readers, and this is true in both English and Spanish.

“Research shows that when teachers explicitly teach students what transfers from one language to the other,” says Patel Below, “students are able to devote more cognitive processing time toward the more complex orthography and morphology systems of English that require more time than the more transparent systems of Spanish.”

Birner had this to add: “While components of these domains might overlap, it can be helpful to think of them individually, and how they’ll impact language and literacy development.”

So let’s take a look at the areas of language where we can leverage cross-linguistic transfer.

  1. Phonetics and phonology: 92% of all of the sounds in English and Spanish have a direct correlation. That means that teachers can focus explicit instruction only on the remaining 8% of sounds—such as the rolled r in Spanish. Meanwhile, we can also encourage them to be language detectives and recognize where the languages do connect and how they can use their skills in one to understand the other. That approach, says Birner, “will not only save valuable time and energy, but it’ll also help [educators] recognize bilingualism as an asset for all of our students.”
  2. Morphology: Students can explore cognates like hospital/hospital and celebration/celebración, while also exploring similarities and differences in pronunciation. “Whether or not they are Spanish-speaking, teachers can look to cross-linguistic transfer guidance and start to recognize things, the prefixes and suffixes that are similar across the two languages,” says Birner.
  3. Syntax and grammar: Spanish and English do have rules and structures that differ from each other, in the areas of word order, gender, conjugation, and possession. As students progress in learning these distinctions, teachers can seize opportunities for explicit instruction. For example, let’s say a student constructs the sentence: “The flower of Ana is pretty.” This is not an error, but an approximation “to be celebrated.” Birner says. “It’s a comprehensible sentence in English that just needs a minor adjustment. We can use this type of sentence as an opportunity to provide explicit instruction on possessives.”
  4. Semantics: Semantics is the study of word meaning and is critical for language learners. Exploring idioms, homonyms and homophones, and other nuances of usage across language can give students the chance to build from similarities and identify differences. “You might do something like hang a chart of idiomatic phrases in each language,” says Birner. “Looking at both languages side by side is a really great way to support your students in learning a second language.”
  5. Pragmatics: Pragmatics encompass the ways people communicate that are nuanced or unsaid. They’re often rooted in cultural norms, which include both physical norms (looking someone in the eye when speaking) and social norms (using euphemisms). “Providing students with explicit instruction on how communicating may differ from culture to culture and situation to situation can help avoid misunderstandings,” says Birner. “It’s also a great way to allow students to see the world in perspective.”

More to explore

Amplify’s biliteracy programs, rooted in the Science of Reading, can help all educators engage with multilingual learners and make the most of cross-linguistic transfer and dual language education. Here are some additional resources for you:

Biliteracy principles, as shared by biliteracy experts (students!)

Our biliteracy video playlist

”The Importance of Dual Language Assessment in Early Literacy” (white paper)

The Importance of Dual Language Assessment in Early Literacy (infographic)

Principles of Biliteracy + the Science of Reading

The Science of Reading

New study provides evidence that assessing multilingual students in their home languages can improve educational outcomes

A new Amplify study of K–3 Spanish-speaking multilingual learners (MLs) shows that more of these students were identified as at risk for not learning to read when their early literacy skills were measured only in English.

Read the research brief. Findings reveal that using only English-language assessments for early literacy can lead to a higher rate of misidentifying Spanish-speaking MLs as at-risk for reading difficulties, underscoring the importance of comprehensive dual-language assessments that help educators better understand their students’ early literacy skills.

For the study, Amplify analyzed data from an intact group of Spanish-speaking MLs in grades K–3 who have Spanish literacy data from mCLASS® Lectura assessments and English literacy data from mCLASS DIBELS® 8th Edition assessments at the beginning, middle, and end of the 2023–2024 school year.

Responding to changing demographics

Changing demographics in the United States public school population necessitate the availability of reliable and valid universal screening assessments for literacy in languages other than English. In 2020, for example, approximately 5 million public school students—10 percent of all students—identified as MLs. For the majority of these students (75 percent), Spanish is one of the top five languages spoken in their state. Unfortunately, an English-only approach to screening bilingual students may underestimate their knowledge and skills, given that limited English proficiency can adversely affect a student’s performance on English measures. Moreover, an English-only approach to assessment fails to capture the knowledge and skills MLs have in their home language that can be leveraged to support their English literacy development through processes of cross-linguistic transfer.

The importance of bilingual assessment

When MLs are assessed in English only, the skills students have from another language may go unrecognized. Educators may see these students as generally struggling readers simply because they are not able to demonstrate fully their literacy skills in English. However, these students likely have knowledge and skills in Spanish and may need support transferring those skills from Spanish to English. Assessing students in their home languages enables educators to identify areas of strength and areas that require further support, ensuring a more comprehensive assessment of their overall language and literacy abilities.

A dual-language approach to early literacy assessment has powerful implications, including:

  • Providing more accurate information about whether students need intervention.
  • Giving educators a more complete understanding of students’ literacy skills, including which skills they possess in each language.
  • Helping educators support students’ language development needs with more precision.

“Although the availability of universal screening assessments for Spanish-speaking MLs has increased in recent years, it’s still not where it needs to be,” said Kajal Patel Below, vice president of biliteracy at Amplify. “Our hope is that this study will shed light on the extent to which the identification of reading intervention support varies for MLs when assessed in both their home language and in English.”

Supporting student literacy development in both languages

A dual-language approach to literacy assessment for Spanish-speaking multilingual learners provides educators with a more comprehensive understanding of students’ literacy development in both languages, highlighting student strengths and bringing to light opportunities for improvement. As the data included in this brief indicate, significantly greater percentages of Spanish-speaking MLs were identified as needing intervention when assessed only in English, providing further evidence that a monolingual approach to assessment fails to capture students’ true range of literacy skills.

Read the full report for more insights and recommendations.

More about the study

The goals for this study were to better understand the extent to which the identification of reading intervention support varies for Spanish-speaking MLs when they are assessed in Spanish and English. Amplify analyzed data from an intact group of Spanish-speaking MLs in grades K–3 who have Spanish literacy data from mCLASS Lectura assessments and English literacy data from mCLASS DIBELS 8th Edition assessments at the beginning, middle, and end of the 2023–2024 school year.

During the 2023–2024 school year, more than 212,000 students in grades K–6 were assessed at least once with mCLASS Lectura. These students were enrolled in schools located across 30 states and the District of Columbia (representing four census regions and all nine census divisions) and one country outside of the United States. Of these, the data for this study were from students who had assessment scores from beginning, middle, and end-of-year in both Spanish and English. Our sample includes more than 21,000 Spanish-speaking MLs in grades K–3 who have data on both assessments at all three times of year.

5 ways to boost biliteracy with the Science of Reading

Research shows that bilingual instruction (including dual language instruction and dual language immersion) supports the long-term success of dual language learners—in both languages, and beyond.

How do we best support those students?

More precisely, how are we serving our emergent bilingual students so that they can develop their biliteracy? This is a question posed by biliteracy expert and Amplify product specialist Alestra Flores Menéndez. And in our recent webinar Leveraging the Science of Reading to Boost Biliteracy, she and other experts attempt to answer it.

The power of biliteracy

Knowing more than one language is a powerful tool for opening up new worlds, meeting different people—or even just asking directions in an unfamiliar place.

But that’s not all. Bilingualism itself is a cognitive strength. Research conducted in 2015 by Claude Goldenberg and Kirstin Wagner links bilingualism to increased control over attention, improved working memory, greater awareness of the structure and form of language, and better abstract and symbolic representation skills.

“Our multilingual learners really are using their brains differently,” says Flores Menéndez.

And as with all students, we need to start early to make sure they’ve got their best shot at literacy.

The number of emerging bilingual students in our classrooms is growing, with 15.5% of them in grades K–3. That group includes the key developmental year—third grade.

Third grade is seen as the last year students learn to read before they start reading to learn. Without proficiency by fourth grade, they’re at risk of struggle across subjects.

And for many students, literacy is biliteracy. So how to make sure they get there?

Helping all multilingual learners succeed

“Bilingual instruction has been proven to be the most effective,” says Amplify biliteracy specialist Ana Torres, M.Ed., citing research by Virginia Thomas and Wayne Collier.

Other models (English immersion, transitional bilingual) are a fit for students with certain language profiles. As Torres notes, “We have to be intentional and purposeful to make sure there are positive outcomes for all students.”

But the proven impact of the bilingual model shows this: Knowledge of, and in, a second language builds from the first.

Foundational skills, vocabulary, and knowledge are essential, and all transfer to the second language—through explicit, research-based instruction.

Key elements of that instruction:

  1. Assessing literacy in both languages. “Assessing what [students] know in their native language is crucial to their success in acquiring that second language,” says Torres. A 2019 study at the University of Oregon looked at phonological awareness among Spanish-speaking pre-K students. (Phonological awareness represents the understanding that words are made up of a series of discrete sounds.) When assessed in English, 63% of students needed Tier 2 or 3 intervention. But when assessed in Spanish, only 21% did. “We need to look at the overall picture of students’ literacy,” Torres says. “Otherwise they’re going to get the wrong instruction.”
  2. Deliberately bridging from the native language to the new one. Spanish and English share many elements, among them letter sounds. If students know the sounds of the letter m in Spanish, they’ll be able to map that sound onto the same letter in English.
  3. Grounding in the Science of Reading. The Simple View of Reading has been validated in more than 150 studies across multiple languages. Foundational skills, vocabulary, and knowledge can all transfer through explicit instruction.
  4. Honoring students’ home languages, cultures, and community experiences. “It’s well documented that when children feel a sense of belonging, they’re more motivated to learn and experience more success in school,” says Menéndez. “Students should see themselves reflected positively in any curricular material.”
  5. Emphasizing knowledge. Perhaps you’re familiar with the iconic baseball study. Students with prior knowledge of baseball greatly outperformed their peers on reading comprehension—even those peers who were stronger readers. “Building knowledge is absolutely essential for literacy development,” says Menéndez.

Learn more

Explore Amplify Caminos.

Watch the full webinar: Leveraging the Science of Reading to Boost Biliteracy.

Biliteracy and Science of Reading principles in English and Spanish.

Read about The Importance of Dual Language Assessment in Early Literacy.

Binge our biliteracy podcast playlist.