Every August, I watch the same scene at school registration tables. A mother leans over a clipboard, working through the home-language survey every family completes when they enroll. She reaches the question about the language spoken at home, hesitates for just a moment, and writes “Spanish.” That answer sets official machinery in motion: identification, committees, program placement. But her child, standing beside her, is learning something no form captures: how the adults in this building react to that word. Do their faces say welcome or complication?
Here is what I have learned leading English-learner programs in large Texas districts: In the first weeks of school, every one of the more than 5 million English learners in America’s public schools, about 1 in 10 students, absorbs one of two lessons about the language they carry. Either it is a strength their school is building on or it is a problem their school is fixing. Nearly everything about the child’s year follows from which lesson lands first. Ultimately, teachers, not programs, decide which one gets taught.
The research is unambiguous about which lesson serves children. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2017 consensus report on educating English learners concluded that these students’ languages and cultures are assets, both for their own development and for the nation. It also found that strong development of the home language supports learning English rather than competing with it. The same report flagged something that should stop us cold: the longtime practice of advising parents to abandon the home language, now often employed when children have disabilities. Nine years later, I still hear that advice given in meetings about children who are struggling.
Student outcomes point in the same direction of bilingualism’s benefits. A randomized study of dual-language immersion program lotteries in a large urban district, published in the American Educational Research Journal in 2017, found that children who won seats in such a program read better in English by the 5th and 8th grades than nonwinning students. The authors estimate the difference as reflecting seven to nine months of learning, and they found no cost to mathematics or science. By 6th and 7th grade, lottery-winning students were less likely by 3 percentage points to 4 percentage points than their counterparts to still be classified as English learners.
Which means many of us, with the best intentions, have been teaching the wrong lesson on day one. Teaching the right one does not require a new program. It requires three moves from teachers in the first weeks, and each costs minutes, not money. No study has tested these three moves as a set. What follows is what I have watched work in classrooms across large Texas districts, and it is consistent with what the research above recommends.
1. Learn what the child brings before anything measures what they lack. An emergent bilingual student’s first weeks are crowded with screeners and placements that inventory their gaps. Jump in ahead of that! Learn to pronounce the child’s name the way their family says it; practice until you have it and never offer an “easier” substitute. Researchers Rita Kohli and Daniel G. Solórzano have documented what happens when schools do the opposite. Students of color who spent years hearing their names mangled or replaced described lasting effects on how they came to see themselves and their families. Then find out what the child can read, count, and explain in their home language, because a child who reads in Spanish is a reader, full stop. Ten minutes of genuine curiosity before the machinery starts tells a child the school sees a person, not a case file.
The goal we name should be bilingualism, not English as a replacement.
2. Give the home language a job in week one. Not decoration. A job. Let students show what they know in the language they know it in while their English grows: A math strategy explained in Portuguese is mathematics learned; a science observation drafted in Arabic is science thinking. Pair newcomers with a bilingual buddy for real tasks, not just tours. When the home language is only wallpaper, all posters and welcome signs but never actual work, children decode the real message quickly: Your language is tolerated here, not needed.
3. Make your first family contact an asset conversation, in their language. Call before there is a problem, use an interpreter if you need one, and say two things explicitly: “Your child brings a strength to my classroom, and please keep your home language strong at home. Read, talk, and argue about big ideas in it.” That direction about the home language counters the harmful advice too many families still receive, and families cannot follow guidance we never give. In my experience, immigrant families ask for that guidance and then act on whatever they are told, which is precisely why it matters what they are told first. The goal we name should be bilingualism, not English as a replacement.
I know what August feels like. It is the most overloaded month of an educator’s year, and the last thing teachers need is another initiative. But this is not an initiative. It is a decision about the first story a child hears, one told in a pronounced name, a math problem in Spanish, a phone call home that leads with a child’s strength.
Yes, time and energy are required. Learning a name takes repetition. Listening to a child think in a language you do not speak takes patience. A call routed through an interpreter takes longer than one that is not. These are minutes you have to protect, not minutes you happen to have. Spend them in the first weeks anyway, because what they teach lasts the rest of the year.
This new school year, when a mother leans over a clipboard and writes “Spanish,” or “Vietnamese,” or “Haitian Creole,” her child should spend the next few weeks discovering that the school understood the full meaning exactly right. It sees their home language not as a problem to solve but as the first of many assets a child brings to the classroom.
