Almost 1 in 4 students are enrolled in a dual-language, Spanish-English program in the Southside schools in San Antonio.
So when the district embraced the “science of reading,” it prioritized figuring out how new practices could work in Spanish—and how instruction could best support students learning a new language.
“If we’re going to do this for our general education classrooms, then we’re going to do it for dual language,” said Alejandra Ramirez, the elementary reading coordinator in the district, in an Oct. 16 Education Week virtual event.
In the national science of reading movement, which aims to bring elementary reading instruction in line with evidence-based practices, Southside Independent school district stands out.
While 45 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation mandating schools take an evidence-based approach to teaching reading, only 10 discuss the needs of English learners in depth, according to a 2023 analysis from the Shanker Institute.
Meanwhile, some advocates and researchers who work in English-learner education have waged a fierce battle against the science of reading movement, arguing that what they perceive as too much focus on phonics is crowding out the focus on spoken language development that English learners need. Reading researchers, in turn, have countered that all students, regardless of their native language, need to be taught how written letters correspond to spoken sounds.
In 2024, the advocacy group the National Committee for Effective Literacy published a report analyzing interviews with 77 educators of multilingual students in states implementing science of reading legislation. The report argued that adoption of these policies “often reduces opportunities for students to learn.”
In Southside, though, the district’s English/language arts and dual-language teams have worked together with the goal that changes to reading instruction should benefit all students. Read on for three of the guiding principles they shared at Education Week’s event.
1. All students can benefit from explicit instruction in how to read words
In Southside’s elementary schools, half of K-2 students’ 135-minute literacy block is devoted to foundational-skills instruction, said Ramirez. That’s the case in general education reading classes, and in dual-language classrooms—where students are learning to read in Spanish.
In dual-language classrooms, these lessons help students unlock written language. But they also help lay a foundation for students to learn how to read in English, too, said Melissa Martinez, the district’s director of bilingual programs.
The letter “A,” for example, exists in both languages, but can make many more sounds in English than it can in Spanish. Making that explicit for children can help them avoid confusion, Martinez said.
2. Seek out resources designed for multilingual students
As Southside district leaders have selected Spanish phonics resources, they’ve gravitated toward programs that were created in Spanish, rather than English programs that have been translated. Ramirez has found that the latter attempt to map English phonics rules onto the Spanish language in a way that doesn’t always make sense, or they use Spanish words that would be unfamiliar to beginning readers.
“Someone that speaks Spanish, that has taught how to read in Spanish, needs to develop these products,” Ramirez said, in an earlier interview with Education Week.
There are a few programs that meet these criteria, she said, naming Esperanza by the Valley Speech Language and Learning Center, and the Spanish phonics program from independent publisher Estrellita. But the market would benefit from more options designed to teach explicit, systematic decoding in Spanish, in U.S. schools, she said.
“If we want our teachers to implement the science of reading, to help our students be proficient readers, we need to have people that create these materials for us and for our teachers,” Ramirez said.
3. Bilingualism is an asset in building literacy skills
In Southside dual-language classrooms, teachers draw on language, reading, and spelling skills that students learn in Spanish to teach in English—and vice versa.
One place this manifests is in morphology instruction, or teaching students about the meaning of word parts. Because many prefixes and suffixes in both languages are derived from Latin and Greek, they’re sometimes the same, or similar. For example, “anti” means against or opposite in English and Spanish.
“In 4th and 5th grade, we focus a lot on prefixes and suffixes, and how do those connect, and how can we transfer what we know in Spanish to what we know in English?” Ramirez said, during the virtual event. Students can further apply that knowledge in other subject-area classes where they have to learn complex, multisyllabic words, Ramirez said.
In a dual-language program, teachers can coordinate instruction to take advantage of these cross-linguistic connections. But even in an English-as-a-second-language program, teachers can draw on the similarities between students’ home languages and English.
“Our students don’t start from zero,” Ramirez said. “They do bring a lot of linguistic skills into the classroom, and we need to home in on them.”
