A Child’s First Language Isn’t a Barrier to Literacy — It’s a Foundation
Early literacy instruction has long been built around a single assumption: that children learn to read best in one language at a time. A new peer-reviewed study led by the LXD Research team complicates that assumption — and offers a more hopeful alternative.
The study examined what happens when kindergarten and second grade students in a diverse Texas school district received personalized decodable texts in both English and Spanish, alongside multilingual resources for their families. The results suggest that a child’s home language, far from getting in the way of English literacy, may be one of the strongest tools a school has for building it.
How Can Structured Literacy Support Multilingual Students?
Multilingual students bring valuable language, knowledge, and cultural experience into the classroom. Yet early literacy research and instruction have often focused on monolingual development, with materials built for English-only classrooms. That framing overlooks something researchers have understood for over a decade: children who learn to read in two languages are not building two separate literacy systems. They transfer phonological awareness, vocabulary, decoding, and comprehension skills across languages (Cummins, 2014; Proctor et al., 2010).
Structured Literacy — explicit, systematic, cumulative instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (Moats, 2020) — has become the dominant framework for early reading instruction in the United States. But structured literacy in English is not automatically structured literacy in Spanish. Each language has its own sounds, spelling patterns, and linguistic structures, and effective bilingual instruction has to address the features of both (Cárdenas Hagan, 2018). Spanish decodable texts built as direct translations of English materials miss this distinction; texts built to follow authentic Spanish phonics patterns do not.
What Happens When Students Receive Decodable Texts in Both Languages?
The research team ran a mixed-methods study across the 2024–2025 academic year in four schools within a Texas school district. Two schools implemented Just Right Reader’s Take Everywhere Literacy Packs — personalized collections of English and Spanish decodable books matched to each student’s phonics proficiency level, with a QR code linking families to a short phonics lesson and multilingual caregiver resources. Two comparison schools used other Science of Reading-aligned decodable materials, without the multilingual family-engagement component.
The team measured literacy outcomes with mCLASS DIBELS, NWEA MAP Fluency, and NWEA MAP Growth assessments, and paired that quantitative picture with surveys and interviews from parents, teachers, and literacy coaches — a design meant to capture both what the numbers showed and what the people living the intervention actually experienced.
Supporting Spanish Can Strengthen Biliteracy
The clearest result in the study: second grade students who used the English and Spanish Literacy Packs achieved significantly higher Spanish MAP Growth scores than comparison students, after adjusting for beginning-of-year reading performance. The DIBELS analyses did not reach statistical significance, but treatment students showed slightly greater average growth in kindergarten and second grade, with small to moderate positive effect sizes (Raymond et al., 2026). Students using the Literacy Packs also showed positive patterns in English and Spanish picture vocabulary and listening comprehension, and a larger share met or exceeded expectations on several MAP Fluency measures.
Put together, the pattern supports a specific and testable idea: Spanish literacy instruction can strengthen the phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and other skills that also support English reading development (Cummins, 2014; Proctor et al., 2010). That transfer does not happen automatically. It requires materials built for the actual features of each language, and consistent opportunities for students to read and discuss texts in both.
What the packs combined
Spanish-specific phonics instruction, English and Spanish decodable texts, personalized reading practice, multilingual family resources, and repeated reading opportunities.
What that combination did
Gave students meaningful practice applying phonics skills in connected text — supporting orthographic mapping and more efficient word recognition (Ehri, 2020).
What Did Families and Educators Observe?
Assessment scores are only part of the story. Parents, teachers, and instructional coaches described changes that standardized measures don’t always capture on their own: students who became more confident, more independent, and more willing to read. Teachers noted greater willingness to read independently and participate in literacy activities. Parents described improvements in reading enjoyment, pronunciation, vocabulary, and sentence-level reading.
One parent described a child who moved from reading individual sight words to reading full sentences independently. These accounts matter for a practical reason, not just a sentimental one: students who experience success with texts matched to their level tend to practice more, and more practice strengthens word recognition, fluency, and comprehension over time.
How Did Multilingual Resources Support Reading at Home?
Families want to support their children’s biliteracy — but schools often don’t give them clear, accessible guidance in a language they read comfortably, which limits how much families can actually do at home (Noguerón-Liu, 2020). The Literacy Packs gave parents a structured, accessible way to practice reading with their children, and the QR code videos let families engage with phonics instruction in the language they preferred.
Family literacy involvement is linked to children’s long-term reading development (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002), but access to books alone rarely produces change on its own — families also need practical strategies and guidance for using them (Sénéchal & Young, 2008). Multilingual resources lower the barrier to that participation. They also do something schools can’t accomplish with translation alone: they treat families as knowledgeable partners, not passive recipients of instructions written for someone else.
How Can Schools Build More Inclusive Literacy Systems?
A few practical lessons follow from this research. Schools should provide decodable texts developed specifically for each language, rather than direct translations — Spanish materials need to reflect authentic Spanish phonics patterns, not repurposed English scope and sequence. Teachers can explicitly connect literacy skills across languages, helping students recognize shared sounds, word parts, and concepts rather than treating each language as its own island. Families need resources in a language they understand, with concrete guidance for how to use them at home. And educators evaluating a program’s impact should weigh confidence, independence, and engagement alongside assessment scores — those experiences shape whether a student keeps choosing to read when no one is watching.
Biliteracy grows when schools build on the languages children already bring with them, instead of asking them to set one aside.
What Are the Study’s Limitations?
The authors are candid about where this evidence is still thin. Some analyses — particularly the Spanish MAP Growth result — relied on small samples, which can produce unstable estimates and limits how far the findings generalize. The implementation period was also relatively short; students may need more time before broader literacy assessments pick up measurable growth. The authors describe this as promising preliminary evidence, not a final word, and call for larger studies across a full academic year with more schools, students, and families.
Just Right Reader funded the study, and LXD Research at Charles River Media used internal resources to support manuscript preparation — worth keeping in mind when weighing the findings. The full study, “Inclusive Literacy Practices Using English and Spanish Decodable Texts for Multilingual Students,” is open access in Education Sciences, Volume 16, Issue 9.
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