In 1953, BĂĄrbara Flores entered kindergarten at Washington Elementary School in Madera, California, a small city in the Central Valley surrounded by farm fields. Her mother and grandmother had talked it up: You’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to like it. She believed them. A little girl who would one day become a teacher, Flores was excited.

But only until she got there.

“I walked out,” Flores recalled recently. She got to her grandmother’s house a few blocks away, furious. “Son mentirosas,” she said. “No entiendo nada. Y jamas voy a regresar.” You’re liars. I don’t understand anything. And I’m never going back.

Flores only spoke Spanish. As the grandchild of Mexican immigrants, she didn’t find her language or culture welcome in the school. But little BĂĄrbara didn’t get her way. And, after depositing her daughter back in the classroom, Flores’ mother asked the teacher a question: Aren’t you paying attention? My daughter walked out. The answer felt like a slap and became a part of family lore. All these little Mexican girls look alike. I didn’t notice.

Flores returned to her old school this fall; the building she walked out of still stands, but almost everything else has changed. Now students speak Spanish because their teachers require them to. Little Mexican girls see their culture celebrated on the walls of every classroom.

Washington students will graduate knowing how to speak, read and write in both Spanish and English, joining a growing number of “dual-language immersion” schools in California. Flores’ eyes open wide as she describes the about-face her alma mater has taken.

“We were punished for speaking Spanish,” she said. “We were hit with rulers, pinched, our braids were pulled. Now the whole school is dual-language.”

The path has not been linear. When Flores was a child, California still had an English-only law on the books from the 1800s. As governor, Ronald Reagan signed a bill eliminating it. Then the Civil Rights Movement ushered in a new era of bilingual education, and the California Legislature went further, requiring the model for students still learning English from 1976 until the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1990s. Voters banned it again in 1998, only reversing the latest prohibition in 2016.

Researchers have found bilingual education helps students learn English faster and can boost their standardized test scores, increase graduation rates, better prepare them for college and much more. California has removed the official barriers to offering this type of instruction since 2016, and the state now champions bilingualism and biliteracy, encouraging all students to strive for both. But eight years after repeal, California schools have yet to recover. A decades-long enrollment slump in bilingual-teacher prep programs has led to a decimated teacher pipeline. And underinvestment by the Legislature, paired with a hamstrung state Education Department, has limited the pace of bilingual education’s comeback. 

The result? A rare case in which Californians can say Texas is inspiring. Both states enroll more than 1 million students still learning English — but last year, the Lone Star State put 40% of them in bilingual classrooms. California managed that for just 10%.

In 1987, Flores didn’t think state policy would go this way. At the time, both states required bilingual education. She was a professor, helping build a bilingual-education teacher prep program at Cal State San Bernardino. Her home state could have kept pace with Texas.

But it didn’t.

The English-only years: 1998 to 2016

By 1998, the bilingual-teacher prep program was flourishing. Flores helped aspiring teachers understand how students learn to read and write in two languages, sending them off into classrooms with binders full of instructional tips. Her daughter, then 10, was learning both English and Spanish through bilingual classes in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Flores was on a parent committee organizing broader support for such programs in the face of a statewide campaign to get rid of them, bankrolled by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz.

Proposition 227, which passed with 61% of the vote, required schools to teach only in English with students who were still learning the language, something that may sound like a good idea but often ends up unnecessarily putting students’ grade-level learning of other subjects on pause while they master English. Flores saw the impact immediately. Faculty on campus called for the elimination of her program, an effort that ultimately failed but showed, she said, “the intensity of the discrimination and language racism that was prevalent.” Enrollment in bilingual-teacher prep programs across the state plummeted.

Flores also watched local school districts respond. “I was shocked at superintendents in the area,” she said. “They just made everybody throw away their Spanish books. It was horrendous.” As she recalls, every single school district in the Inland Empire got rid of its bilingual programs except San Bernardino City Unified, where parent activism helped ensure the district took advantage of an exception to the new law.

Dual-language students outperform their peers in San Bernardino City Unified

At the time, student achievement data from San Bernardino City Unified had shown that bilingual programs were helping kids succeed. And over the next two decades, researchers studying programs across the United States released a steady stream of evidence about the benefits of bilingual education, especially a version called “dual language.” Traditional bilingual education essentially lets students use their first language while they learn English. Once students become fluent, their schools shift entirely to English instruction, which was the goal all along. Dual-language programs, by contrast, set bilingualism as the goal. Students continue to take courses in Spanish or another language for about half of the school day until they leave the program.

While dual-language programs often stop after elementary school, the “” stretches through students’ K-12 years and into their working lives. Dual-language students have been found to score higher than their peers on both  and exams by middle school. They also get higher scores  in high school, setting them up to be more competitive in college admissions. And importantly, a team at Stanford found that native Spanish speakers were more likely to test out of English-learner services , a coveted goal because of how well “former English learners” do. University of Chicago researchers just released data showing that Chicago high schoolers in this group had  GPAs and SAT scores, high school graduation rates, and community college enrollment and persistence rates.

Patricia Gándara co-directs the UCLA Civil Rights Project, which has published similar findings, and has spent decades of her career cataloging the bilingual advantage. She laments the narrow value placed on bilingual education in the U.S., where it has historically been pursued as a way to help kids who don’t speak English learn the language more quickly and then succeed in English-only classes.

“That’s a very shortsighted view,” Gándara said, “particularly from the research that we’ve done that shows kids who get a strong bilingual education are more likely to go to college, they’re more likely to complete college, they’re more likely to have better jobs and better opportunities.”

Yet while policymakers didn’t catch on right away, well-off and well-educated white parents did, seeing the economic benefits of bilingualism for their children very clearly.

Glendale Unified School District launched its first Spanish-English dual-language program in 2003, going on to add programs in six other languages while official state policy was to ban them. Last year, 85% of the students enrolled were fluent English speakers, according to program director Nancy Hong.

Immigrant families, weighed down by the pressure to speak English and make sure their children do too, have been hard to recruit. Hong said immigrant parents have long been concerned that letting their children spend half the school day or more hearing their home language will get in the way of learning English, even though research has shown it can make the whole process go faster. “The goal is to dismantle those myths and misperceptions,” she said. But even though about 20% of students districtwide are English learners, only about 10% of them are in dual-language programs.

Many immigrant families, however, have become strong advocates for the programs. JosĂ© Sanjas, a Mexican-born father in Madera Unified School District, takes his 6-year-old daughter past her neighborhood school every day en route to one of the district’s dual-language programs. He and his wife want to preserve their native language as their daughter grows up here, but the draw isn’t only personal; Sanjas also sees how bilingualism will benefit his daughter in the workplace.

“She can help more people in the future,” Sanjas said. “Professionally, she’ll be able to serve everyone.”

Spurred on by support like his, a diverse coalition of school leaders in Madera Unified had, by 2016, come to see dual-language education as key to turning around the district’s chronically low performance, especially among the children of immigrants. Flores had helped make the case, inviting school board members to the annual conference of the California Association for Bilingual Education. And in Flores’ hometown, U.S.-born, white families were among those speaking up in support of the programs, knowing even if the immigrant students’ test scores had the most room to grow, their children could benefit too.

Statewide, public opinion had swung in the other direction; that November, about 74% of California voters said yes to Proposition 58, officially allowing bilingual education back in California classrooms.

“It was a relief we [could] finally move forward for our children,” Flores said. “We lost a whole generation of kids — quite a few generations, really — because of English-only.” 

The next generation, however, is still waiting.

A limping recovery: 2016 to 2024

Flores spent 40 years training future teachers before retiring in 2019. Across three institutions and 32 years at Cal State San Bernardino, she likely taught 10,000 students, many of whom remain sprinkled throughout the state’s bilingual-education system. But if anything defines the legacy of Prop. 227, it is the shattered teacher pipeline it left in its wake.

GĂĄndara, of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, said the current state of affairs is “one of those stories of ‘I told you so.’ 
 I could see what the problem was going to be: that when people came back to their senses and realized what a mistake this was, the big fallout was going to be that we didn’t have the teachers.” 

California colleges are not producing nearly enough teachers to meet the state’s bilingual-education goals. During the 2022-23 school year, the state commission on teacher credentialing only authorized 1,011 new bilingual teachers — . Only seven went to teachers who speak Vietnamese, the  in California schools that year. And it actually gave out fewer credentials to Spanish-speaking teachers that year than in the three years prior.

The Legislature has not ignored this problem entirely. In 2017, it funded six grants, totaling $20 million, to help districts coach up bilingual staffers and prepare them to lead bilingual classrooms. But Edgar Lampkin, CEO of the California Association for Bilingual Education, said seeding such “grow your own” programs falls far short of addressing the statewide need. “That’s not systemic,” he said.

In 2022, the National Resource Center for Asian Languages, based at Cal State Fullerton, got state money to train 200 teachers over five years. They’re on track, and the center’s director, Natalie Tran, is proud that their programs are not only increasing the number of teachers certified to teach in Asian languages, but also diversifying the languages they speak. She expects to certify teachers who speak Tagalog, Hmong and Khmer this school year. Still, she said, the state needs to do more to train additional teachers of Asian languages, including the less common ones. “We’re going to need help from policymakers to make this happen,” Tran said.

She isn’t the only one calling on lawmakers to be part of the solution. Anya Hurwitz is executive director of SEAL, a nonprofit that got its start as an initiative of the Sobrato Family Foundation to address achievement gaps between immigrant and native-born children in Silicon Valley. She says the state underfunds education, which gets in the way of doing what’s best for kids who don’t speak English.

In 2022, the last year for which  is available, New York spent almost $30,000 per student. California spent about $17,000. And besides its support for teacher training, the Legislature has only given districts  extra to start or expand dual-language programs. In Massachusetts, home to about one-tenth the number of kids still learning English, the Legislature disbursed $11.8 million for the same work, kicking off its own recovery from an English-only law.

“Funding is not the solution to everything in and of itself,” Hurwitz said, “but at the same time, we can’t build capacity without funding and resources.”

Back in Flores’ hometown, Madera administrators have been able to use state and federal money earmarked for their sizable number of immigrant families and those living in poverty to achieve their dual-language goals. But startup costs for dual-language programs are expensive. Teacher preparation programs, Superintendent Todd Lile said, are not producing graduates who are ready to do this work, leaving districts like his with steep professional development costs.

A residency program with Cal State Fresno has given Madera a solid pipeline of teachers, but the recent grads have to clear all the usual hurdles of being new to the profession while also adapting to using Spanish in the classroom. While these new hires at Washington Elementary School grew up bilingual, they went to school through the Prop. 227 years, meaning most of them didn’t develop an academic vocabulary in Spanish.

Viviana Valerio, a kindergarten teacher, said that history made bilingual education an intimidating proposition. “I commonly speak Spanish at home, but then when I was thinking about teaching, I was thinking, ‘OK, academic terms, I don’t know how to translate that,’ or ‘Parents ask me a question and I can’t think of it, I’m going to want to transition into English,’” she said. “For me, that was the scary part.”

Texas, too, lacks bilingual-education teachers, echoing a shortage present in much of the country, but the state is far ahead of California; many districts are able to recruit their own alumni because their programs have been around so long. Texas also continues to invest in bilingual education, helping districts comply with state mandates to offer it. Like California, Texas gives districts more per-pupil funding for every student still learning English; unlike California, Texas offers an additional premium for each of them enrolled in a dual-language program.

As an extra incentive to start and maintain these programs, Texas has started bumping up funding for the native English speakers enrolled too. Research shows the programs work better when classes are evenly split between native English speakers and speakers of the program’s second language. Then, not only are students learning their second language from the teacher but from their peers as well. Conveniently, this also makes for more integrated classrooms, something Gándara said California needs.

“We haven’t been able to take advantage of that, in large part because people don’t pay attention to that as a major issue and also because we don’t have the teachers to pull it off,” Gándara said.

Indeed, districts across the state cite staffing as a major barrier to starting or expanding their programs. Some have gone abroad to recruit. Others have been forced to scrap their plans entirely. Newark Unified School District, in the Bay Area, got rid of its dual-language program this year because it couldn’t find teachers to staff it. “We tried everything,” said Karen Allard, assistant superintendent of education services.

For more than a decade now, the state’s Education Department has tried to champion bilingual programs. Students who can prove their fluency in two languages before graduation get a special seal on their diplomas. The department also implores schools to help the children of immigrants maintain their home language while learning English, building that recommendation into its 2017 . By 2030, it wants half of California students on a path to .

Yet all of this largely amounts to cheerleading. The department is , a result of the state’s commitment to sending almost all K-12 funding directly to school districts, and its support for bilingual education has not come with any firm demands.

Conor Williams, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., recently found himself — a self-described “professional lefty” — in the surprising position of . Besides following Texas’ lead on funding, he said, California should rethink teacher licensing. The state requires college graduates to pass a suite of tests to become teachers, but Williams points out the tests don’t lead to better instruction and can keep good teachers from classrooms. Getting rid of the requirement could bring more bilingual adults into the profession and expand the teacher pipeline.

Hard to overcome, however, is California’s shift toward more local control over schooling. Williams doesn’t always agree with what the Texas education department does with its power, but the state’s centralized approach means it has “enough power and muscle and will to set rules and hold districts to them,” he said. California’s  is widely popular and has ensured districts get more state money to serve students still learning English as well as those in foster care and low-income households. But, Williams points out, local control has its limits.

“You don’t win civil rights battles by leaving it up to local school boards,” he said.

Still, districts like Madera are moving ahead on their own. In 2020, Flores’ alma mater, Washington Elementary, became Madera Unified’s second dual-language school, welcoming its first class of kindergartners who are expected to leave proficient in both English and Spanish.

Mateo Diaz Zanjas was one of them. He’s now a fourth-grader and speaks in easy Spanish about the school and his long-term dream of going to Harvard. Upon hearing that he and his peers speak very good Spanish, he eagerly replies: “We also speak good English.” And he proves it, going on to answer questions in English about his favorite subjects and the languages he speaks with certain friends.

Administrators, however, are still waiting for the data to show that their bet on bilingual education will pay off in student achievement gains. The pandemic interrupted their early years and set them back, and the oldest students aren’t doing as well as district leaders would have hoped. Commitment to the programs, however, has not waivered. Students’ overall test scores remain low, but their growth scores — or how much they learn over the course of the year — are high.

The district is helping students learn English more quickly, too, meaning they are becoming “former English learners” faster with the newer supports and joining the district’s highest-performing student group.

In the meantime, Madera teachers are using bilingual education to give Spanish speakers grade-level material, knowing that once they sharpen their English skills, all that information will transfer.

“Kids can learn math in Spanish; it’s still math,” Lile said. “They can learn social studies in Spanish; it’s still history and geography. These subject matters don’t exist only in English.” 

During Flores’ recent visit to Madera Unified, she heard Lile describe his long-term goals for the district, including higher graduation rates and better college readiness for the children of immigrants. She looked on proudly, sure her hometown district was finally getting it right.

An uncertain future: 2024 and beyond

A few years ago, Flores introduced Lile to Margarita Machado-Casas, a professor at San Diego State’s Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education, which has long been a top producer of the state’s bilingual teachers. Machado-Casas is helping the district figure out what concrete steps teachers and administrators should take to follow the high-level recommendations of the state’s English Learner Roadmap. They started out with “Principle 1,” which asks school and district staffers to see immigrant students’ language and culture as assets rather than seeing their lack of English proficiency as a deficit. Pointing to Madera’s long and painful history of discriminating against immigrant students, including Flores, Machado-Casas said this principle unexpectedly took the entire first year, requiring “courageous conversations” — including asking staffers to think deeply about whether they believed in the work enough to stay in the district.

Machado-Casas is helping educators in Madera understand both how to help immigrant students tackle grade-level material and convince them that the students can handle it.

Flores hopes the work ends up being a playbook for the entire state — which could soon need one. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed  this year requiring the Education Department to come up with a statewide plan for helping districts adopt the road map’s guidelines and report on their progress.

This planning process guarantees California will be over a decade into its recovery from the English-only years before the state even considers holding schools accountable for changing their practices. When New York passed a blueprint for how to serve English learners in 2014, it followed it up with new state regulations that same year, creating stricter policies for serving students who were still learning English, including a broader mandate for bilingual education, which had already been required for decades.

Alesha Moreno-Ramirez leads the California Education Department’s multilingual support division. She said state budget limitations have gotten in the way of implementing the English Learner Roadmap and said any call to require bilingual education like Texas or New York would have to come from the Legislature, not the department. “That said, we would enthusiastically support the movement toward requiring bilingual education,” she added.

Advocates caution such a mandate would have to come with enough funding to help districts create high-quality programs, but many agree it would be a win for California students. Children from immigrant families speak , according to the Education Department, but 93% of them speak one of 10. To require bilingual programs, the Legislature would likely tweak the current law, which says if the parents of 30 or more students in a single school request a language acquisition program, the school has to offer it “to the extent possible.” Texas, Illinois and New York have similar laws, but instead of requiring bilingual programs in response to parent advocacy, they do so based solely on enrollment.

Flores thinks the state is at least moving in the right direction. And Madera Unified gives her hope. During her recent visit, she was flooded with memories: She saw the tree she and her friends used to circle while playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” She visited the classroom she walked out of as a 5-year-old, where the walls are now decorated with vocabulary in Spanish as well as English. She suffered in that room 70 years ago. Now, little Mexican girls do not.

“We don’t stop,” she said. “We keep plugging away. That’s our tenacity. That’s our grit. And our motivation, of course, is for our children.”

This was originally published on .

Teaching students who speak different languages can be an exciting endeavor that more and more teachers are experiencing. Diversity is an asset, something to be embraced and encouraged. It helps broaden students’ perspectives. Listening to and learning alongside peers from various cultures allows students to feel more connected and capable of navigating the world. When educators feel prepared to teach in such classrooms, they can celebrate this diversity properly while also developing students’ English literacy skills.

Here’s some advice for how teachers can amplify diversity in ways that acknowledge students’ heritage and foster a productive learning environment for everyone.

Check your own biases

Bias is a powerful thing, and it can exist in ways we don’t even realize. The first step in effectively teaching in a language-diverse classroom is understanding and overcoming your own assumptions as an educator.

Do you believe that all children can learn, regardless of their language background, what they look like, and their socioeconomic status? Cognitive research tells us they can—and that canlearn how to read, write, and speak in two or more languages at the same time. But sometimes, teachers find excuses not to believe that: This child’s parents don’t speak English, therefore it will be difficult for them to learn English at school. Their parents aren’t caring/giving/interested in education because they work all the time. Parents don’t read to their child therefore it will be difficult for the child to learn to read. 

Being honest with yourself and checking your biases at the door is critical to ensuring every child’s success.

Honor students’ cultural diversity

Acknowledging and celebrating students’ cultural heritage creates an environment where all students feel welcome—and therefore ready to learn. That means learning how to pronounce each child’s name correctly, building a classroom library that includes books reflecting characters with similar backgrounds and interests, and knowing about their interests and individual lived experiences.

Knowing what’s important to your students and their parents can help foster deep connections. We know from learning science that serotonin and dopamine are important aspects to learning, and those chemicals are more likely to flow in a safe, secure, and welcoming learning environment.

Learn about their heritage languages

Sometimes, teachers think they have to know all of the languages their students speak to be successful. That’s not true. However, learning at least a little bit about each language can help teachers make invaluable connections for their students. And with AI, it’s now easier than ever for teachers to gain this knowledge. You can start by asking an AI engine which letters and letter sounds are the same and which are different when comparing English to a student’s heritage language.

For example, if you know that in Spanish, “ll” makes a “y” sound and “qu” is pronounced as a hard “c,” you can help native Spanish speakers overcome some common hurdles in learning to read and speak in English.

Leverage students’ skills in their heritage language

Children who have grown up learning how to speak another language have already acquired initial literacy skills that can help them learn English—and you can leverage these skills to make the process easier for them. For instance, if you know which letters and letter combinations sound the same in a student’s native language and English, this gives you a natural entry point for helping that child learn English.

Use curriculum tools that follow the science of reading

Regardless of their first language, all children learn to read and write in any language most effectively by following an evidence-based, structured literacy curriculum grounded in the science of reading.

To meet this requirement, the curriculum should begin with phonological awareness activities, followed by systematic, explicit phonics instruction that leads to decoding simple text supporting this instruction. What this means is, if you’re introducing the short “a” sound to students, you should have them practice reading decodable texts that emphasize the short “a” sound. The lessons and activities should build on students’ phonics skills in a logical progression, leading to fluency with increasingly complex texts.

At the same time, students should be developing their vocabulary and learning about syntax and semantics to extract meaning from the text. These five elements—phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension—should be taught together in a structured approach to literacy.

If the curriculum you’re using doesn’t meet these criteria, then you likely need some evidence-based materials to use in your classroom, along with professional learning on implementing the science of reading into instruction. A good place to start is the and the Online Language and Literacy Academy.

Teaching in a language-diverse classroom is an exciting prospect! By following these five strategies, educators can celebrate this diversity and create an environment where all students can learn and thrive.

is bridging that gap with a one-of-a-kind new program to make certain Latino fathers see the difference they can make and have the tools and information they need to provide a strong foundation for their infants’ and young children’s early learning.

Though they’re so small and winsome, it might be hard to think of Latino infants and toddlers as something so serious sounding as “agents of change,” but that’s exactly what are. By any demographic measure, it’s plain that this population will have profound effects on every aspect of life in the U.S. and will be the engine of change at all levels of U.S. society. For our society to thrive, Latino children need to thrive.

Unfortunately, that isn’t necessarily the case. Though U.S.-born Latino babies are driving the nation’s population growth and shaping the makeup of its child population, they remain doubly invisible as one of the most under-recognized and under-served of U.S. population groups. According to the , as of October 2021, Hispanic children had the lowest enrollment rates in early childhood education (ECE), after Pacific Islanders, compared to all other population groups.

It’s an urgent, all-hands-on-deck moment for those who want to see Latino children take their place as fully engaged, fully resourced, equal contributors to U.S. society. UnidosUS is committed that Latino fathers be a part of that effort.

“With a population of more than 62 million people on its way to becoming 110 million in the coming decades, sharing information about the importance of early learning and dual language development with Latino families is a crucial mission for us,” says Dr. Robert Stechuk, UnidosUS’s director of Early Childhood Education initiatives.

Incorporating key scientific findings in the fields of infant development, early reading and dual language learning, the nonprofit has produced Vital and Valuable: Latino Fathers and Their Infants, their latest topic brief in the organization’s Latino Infant Initiative (operated in partnership with Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors). This powerful, practical program is designed to break down myths and misunderstandings fathers might have about early learning and put the latest research into the hands of Latino fathers in an actionable way.

Father engagement is an active concern within UnidosUS, which serves as the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization and has an affiliate network of almost 300 community-based organizations throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

“At least 50 of our affiliates have early childhood programs or offerings,” Stechuk says. “Several affiliates have been telling us within the last year or two that they’ve been launching fatherhood initiatives. Others have said they’ve been working on father engagement but stopped because of a shortage of materials relevant to Latino dads.

“When I went to the National Head Start Association’s conference at the end of 2022, many of the sessions were on father engagement,” he said. “So, there’s a lot of interest in bringing fathers into the picture. The challenge is that there are websites with literally thousands of resources and a lot of it has even been translated into Spanish. But there is minimal information related to early language, early literacy, the important of early reading: all the developmental information that can show dads how to build their children’s vocabulary, language skills and love of reading/books that underlie successful literacy.”

To counter this dearth of information, UnidosUS launched its Vital and Valuable brief in May and is distributing it to all of its affiliates nationally and through various channels to reach the UnidosUS community and other stakeholders.

Fathers want the information, Stechuk says.

In 2022, five parent focus groups were held at UnidosUS affiliates to learn more about the experiences of Latino parents and their families. The fathers who joined had important concerns about how to do the best for their children. They talked about wanting to step outside the traditional cultural roles they grew up with and having an active role in supporting their children’s development.

“I have a baby and want to be there for my child,” one said. “When I was growing up, my dad abandoned us, so I want to be there for my child.”

Another said, “I grew up Latino in Chicago but turned my back on my culture and was totally alienated from my heritage. Now, I appreciate my culture and want my children to have that. I want them to be bilingual and to do well in school. I’m hungry for more information.”

Being Bilingual

Vital and Valuable encourages fathers to support their children in being bilingual despite any messages they might have heard to the contrary. It’s a great asset for babies’ brain development and language learning — in any language. In numerous studies, researchers have found that bilingual babies learn English at the same rate as monolingual infants and develop vocabularies that equal or exceed those of English-only babies. Juggling two languages doesn’t confuse babies, as the pernicious myth goes, it enhances their executive function — the set of mental skills and self-regulation that helps people plan, problem-solve and respond in an orderly way to the world around them.

The Latino community has long been affected by systemic racism, with the suppression of their Spanish language one of its most damaging aspects. Latino families have been told by school personnel that they could damage their children’s development and academic success by speaking Spanish to them, and children have been and still are being bullied or teased for using Spanish in class or on the playground.

Vital and Valuable provides easy-to-follow pointers, such as, “If you speak Spanish, interact with your baby in Spanish. If you speak Spanish and English, interact with your baby in either language.” The most important thing, the brief says, is for dads to speak with their babies every day in whatever language they choose because providing experiences with language right after baby is born is the best way to start building reading success.

Another myth Vital and Valuable lays to rest is the idea that talking to babies doesn’t matter because they can’t speak yet. Reading success is built from Day One in a child’s life, and the brief boils down the research supporting how a rich daily bath in language, or more than one, with lots of “serve and return” interactions, builds the foundation of reading comprehension.

Fathers’ Play — Different and Essential

Fathers’ growing interest in being more connected with their young children coincides with a growing body of research into dads’ unique contribution to early learning. They aren’t just moms with deeper voices; they bring unique characteristics to infant speech development. Studies have observed that fathers use more rare words and fewer common words with their babies than mothers do, and their speech is often more diverse and challenging to the child. Fathers use significantly more wh words (why? what? who?) and ask for clarification more often than mothers do — strategies that may be unconscious but that researchers believe foster children’s reasoning abilities as well as strengthening their vocabulary.

For decades, researchers and psychologists — even families themselves — have assumed that the mother-child bond was the most important in the child’s life, while overlooking the profound contribution fathers make in their children’s development.

“In speaking with fathers,” Stechuk says, “it’s very clear that virtually all dads want their children to be academically successful. So, we want to engage fathers there to talk about what they want for their children. We want to talk about reading as essential for that success.

“Once children fall behind grade level, they tend to stay behind,” he says. “Failure to read is a real poison. It poisons children’s achievement, poisons their self-concept and self-esteem. Poisons their futures, really.

“And guess what? The antidote is early language development. By spending a few moments every day talking back and forth with their children and using some language strategies that don’t cost any money, fathers are giving their children the foundation for long-term reading success.”

Fathers themselves may be the ones who are least aware of how much they matter to their children’s early development. After reading Vital and Valuable, there will be no room for doubt.

In July 2022, Stechuk was part of the UnidosUS team that conducted parent focus groups at its affiliate , which promotes school readiness for Latino children, in San Antonio, Texas. The parents whose children were receiving speech therapy described how therapists instructed them to use English only at home. One mother of a child with a hearing disability reported being told: “Try speaking to him in English. Don’t bring in any Spanish right now
. You don’t want to confuse him since he’s just starting to hear.”

Late last year, Stechuk and colleagues presented these findings at a session of the National Head Start Association Parent and Family Engagement Conference. They asked participants if speech therapists or other professionals had told them that growing up with two languages is “confusing” for children, and the response was immediate. “At least a dozen hands went up,” he recalls, and many personal stories came out.

“Some schools or early intervention personnel are still treating bilingualism as some kind of problem or disability,” Stechuk says.

UnidosUS’s recently published captures many more of these miscues, identifying three counterproductive myths that persist in spite of research that’s been around for decades:

• Myth #1: Young children can be “confused” by more than one language
• Myth #2: Multiple languages may compete with each other in the child’s brain
• Myth #3: Latino children with disabilities are “better off” if parents stop speaking Spanish in favor of speaking English.

When therapists offer misguided advice, Stechuk explains, there’s a danger that Latino families will question their own experience, possibly curtailing their interactions with their young children. Three out of four of these parents who participated in the UnidosUS focus groups, he says, are reading to their children on a daily basis, making time for this activity even when juggling multiple jobs and responsibilities. The therapists’ advice to stop speaking Spanish could actually undermine the communication skills it is intended to help.

“Shining a light on these issues is an important part of advancing a Prenatal to 3 movement of Latinx/a/o communities” says Amilcar Guzmán of the , which supports the work of UnidosUS. “Capturing the voices of Latina parents is central to creating the supports necessary to enhance the lives of historically underinvested communities.”

Both/And

“Latino families recognize the long-term benefits of bilingualism,” Stechuk says.  “The heritage language is an asset children can draw upon throughout their lives.” Code switching, part of that, is widely understood as an effective communication strategy.

This is also the official position of (ASHA), which “as a normal phenomenon engaged in by many fluent bilingual speakers.” A definitive text the ASHA cites, , states unequivocally: “This is not to be considered indicative of a language disorder.”

Evidently, however, at least some of ASHA’s 223,000 members and affiliates — audiologists and speech-language pathologists as well as the scientists and students who research how humans communicate — aren’t getting the message. The question is how to make sure that more professionals make better use of the brain science behind bilingualism.

“ASHA recognizes multilingualism as an asset,” says Megan-Brette Hamilton, chief staff officer for multicultural affairs at the organization. “It also recognizes that all children, with and without communication disorders, can become multilingual communicators in supportive, language-rich environments.” Hamilton adds that while many children are learning and speaking English in their educational settings, they still need to be able to communicate with their family and community and maintain a connection to their cultural-linguistic heritage.

“It’s not an ‘either/or’; it’s a ‘both/and.’”

Hamilton says the association advocates for an additive view of bi/multilingualism, and many clinicians partner with bilingual service providers or interpreters/culture brokers so both English and a child’s heritage language are supported in service delivery. “ASHA also makes it a point to provide its members with professional education that assures they consider and use current evidence-based practices that address and promote all languages of exposure.”

Stechuk notes that engaging colleges and universities who train speech language therapists, to make sure all early intervention practitioners take the evidence into account, is also a critical next step.

Difference vs. Disorder

Viorica Marian, professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University and author of the forthcoming , says the research suggests that bilingualism confers all sorts of advantages. “Upper and upper-middle-class families view it as an asset,” she says, “but the nice thing is that everyone can reap the benefits of bilingualism.”

She contends that the English-only advice that many specialists dispense “is about bias, not data” and a misunderstanding of “difference” versus “disorder.” Just because people do things differently from us doesn’t mean they’re doing them wrong. In fact, we monolinguals might have something to learn. Marian’s includes these facts in a section on “What Clinicians Should Know”:

• Bilingual children develop an earlier understanding of taxonomic relationships than their monolingual peers (e.g., car and bus are vehicles).
• Linguistic input co-activates both languages in bilinguals; when bilinguals hear or read words in one language, partially overlapping linguistic structures in the other language also are activated.
• Bilinguals have greater gray matter density than monolinguals in certain left hemisphere regions.

“If the brain is an engine,” she wrote in a , “bilingualism may help to improve its mileage, allowing it to go further on the same amount of fuel.”

Confusion about Linguistic Confusion

Children manifest learning and speech disabilities regardless of bilingualism, says Fred Genesee, professor emeritus of psychology at McGill University. “Bilingualism doesn’t exacerbate disabilities, and it doesn’t make the impairments better, either.”

Genesee has also been researching bilingualism for decades. He traces the origins of the bias toward monolingualism to longstanding nationalistic, xenophobic beliefs and to flawed academic methods, specifically citing the German linguist Werner Leopold, who wrote about his own daughters’ linguistic confusion in the 1940s. (.)

“It’s unlikely the brain is so limited,” Genesee says, noting that subsequent research has found that even newborns can distinguish between two languages, based on the rhythmic pattern (also known as prosody). His (2015) maintains, “Children who acquire two languages from birth achieve the same fundamental milestones in language development with respect to babbling, first words and emergence of word combinations as monolingual children within the same time frame despite the fact that they have less exposure, on average, to each language than monolinguals.”

Artificial restrictions on bilingualism, Genesee says, can jeopardize parent-child relationships as well as the neurocognitive benefits of rich language exposure or what he calls “vitamins and minerals for the brain.” Language is a key component of culture, literacy, communication, among other nutrients a young mind needs.

“The heritage language,” Genesee says, “is a part of who they are.”

To be clear, the baby talk we’re discussing is not of the goo-goo, gah-gah sort of speech. Infant-directed speech is the high-pitched, singsong, slowed-down way adults talk to babies that sets the stage for vocabulary-building conversational turns — Is that your hand? Look at that hand! And five little fingers! Most adults automatically fall into this exaggerated cadence and register of speech when they come face to face with a baby.

To discover their preference for infant-directed speech, a unique study of hundreds of babies involving 17 labs on four continents compared babies from bilingual backgrounds to babies from monolingual backgrounds, and exposed them to many different language combinations. According to primary investigator Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein, associate professor of psychology at Montreal’s Concordia University, each baby was played short recordings of English-speaking mothers using both infant-directed and adult-directed speech. The global nature of the study ensured that many different language combinations were represented.

Regardless of their native language, the babies responded more to the recordings of infant-directed speech, or baby talk, than to the adult-directed speech. All the babies preferred the baby talk samples, which in this study were recorded in English, over adult-directed speech, but babies from homes in which English was spoken really liked it. In baby research, Byers-Heinlein says, looking indicates listening, and when the babies who came from homes in which English was spoken heard the recordings by English-speaking moms, they really perked up.

“The more familiar they were with the language, the better they liked that infant-directed speech,” Byers-Heinlein says. “A baby who was hearing English 75% of the time in their home would show a greater preference than a baby who was hearing English 25% of the time.” The researchers were not testing the babies’ preference for English, but whether the infants were especially tuned in to infant-directed speech. The fact that the babies whose native language was English showed a marked preference for the English baby talk points to how exquisitely babies are listening and picking up on the languages they hear in their environment.

“We think that interest is the foundation of language acquisition,” she says. “They hear it and think, ‘Oh, this is something for me. I should pay attention here.’ They’re paying attention to all the human speech they hear, but they really respond to the baby talk directed at them, and we think these adaptations help the learning process for them.”

One of the hallmarks of infant-directed speech is that it is repetitive, she says. Look at the ball. Look at the ball. Do you see the ball? Babies are keenly attuned to repetition and the really close repetitions in infant-directed speech appear to help them start unlocking the sound, the words and the grammar they need to figure out language. Infants are more able to focus more efficiently and distinguish one word from another in the slowed-down cadences of infant-directed speech. Some studies have shown that babies learn words more effectively and demonstrate better long-term memory for words spoken in infant-directed speech.

Previous studies of the use of infant-directed speech have been primarily conducted in North America on monolingual babies. What distinguishes this research from other studies is the large-scale, multi-site study on bilingual infants. The project tested 333 bilingual babies and 384 monolingual infants in two age groups: 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months.

Knowing more about bilingual babies is essential, Byers-Heinlein says, because the number of bilingual families in both the U.S. and Canada continues to rise. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, nearly 14 million U.S. kids speak a language other than English at home. In California, 44% of children grow up in bilingual homes. The latest Canadian census has the number of bilingual residents at 18%, the highest on record.

The study arose as part of a remarkable research collaboration, , a project that brings researchers together to address challenging questions about the nature of early development and how it’s studied.

The ManyBabies project is conducted globally with Open Science at its core. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) describes Open Science as “a methodology that allows scientific information, data and outputs to be more widely accessible and reliably harnessed with the active engagement of all the stakeholders.” It encourages science to be more connected to societal needs and promotes equal opportunities for scientists, policymakers and citizens, making it a game-changer in bridging the science, technology and innovation gaps among and within countries.

According to UNESCO, the Open Science movement has spread rapidly across nations since its inception and its call for the “opening of the gates of knowledge” to accelerate the achievement of scientific solutions for global challenges.

According to Byers-Heinlein, “ManyBabies is the most exciting thing I’ve been involved with in my career. I can’t believe this is a thing that is actually happening.

“Infant research has a number of problems,” she says, “one of them being that our samples are so small. How many babies can I actually test in my lab? Just finding the babies, bringing them in, convincing the parents to take part in the study and then, half the babies don’t complete the study because they cry, or they get bored or they just don’t want to. I mean, they’re babies, right? They’re just hard to study — and especially if you consider how precise you need to be when you think of infants. A baby of 12 months is very different from an 18-month-old.

“So, imagine if you want to study adults, but you only want to recruit adults who are 52 years and one month old. That’s a little nuts. But with babies, that’s how precise you need to be.

“And because of the way science works, the research has been very fragmented. I do things in my lab; you do things in your lab and maybe we publish something and talk about it at a conference. But how do we make real progress on these things and get the kind of samples we need?”

The answer, through Open Science, is that the researchers put their heads together and start creating collaborative projects like ManyBabies. Byers-Heinlein compares it to the way scientists in other fields do their work; for example, particle physicists who don’t each have their own particle accelerator but plan the science together, collaborate and make progress in particle physics that none would have been able to accomplish on their own.

“ManyBabies was born as a way for all these infant researchers to work together,” she says. “First it was a few researchers talking to each other, then emails back and forth and people began to get really excited about the idea of planning a study together, then each tests the babies in our own labs. Our normal sample size might be 16 babies or maybe 32 babies. But now, we have studies involving hundreds of babies from around the world.”

The study on bilingual babies is one of the first to come out of the ManyBabies project, and Byers-Heinlein says the collaboration is just getting started.

“It’s really unprecedented,” she says. “Think about coordinating across 69 labs and studying thousands of babies. It’s an incredible movement to work together and it’s opened up many more possibilities for further study. It’s a very rich data set. And the data is all completely public — anyone can take a look at all the data. It’s very unusual, because often scientists are hesitant to share their data with other researchers.”

Here’s a look at some of the other fascinating  at ManyBabies. Meanwhile, be loud and proud when speaking to your infant in baby talk: It’s their love language, no matter what language you use.