Home-School Connection: Engaging Families of Multilingual Learners of English With Reading

Building a healthy, thriving home-school connection with families of multilingual learners of English (MLEs) can assist with fortifying the reading skills our students have. When educators work with families to strengthen MLEs’ reading, we position students to become more successful readers, writers, communicators, and thinkers.

Building a healthy and thriving home-school connection with families does not happen overnight. Families will need to feel safe to connect and communicate with the educational system (you), and it is beneficial for families to know the purpose of the relationship.

• Safety: If we are going to ask families to partner with us for the sake of their child’s education, it is essential that they feel safe to do so. Families will engage more with educators and with their children when they feel encouraged to ask questions, become curious, know that mistakes are part of the process, and embrace vulnerability. Educators can model safety through everyday communications with families and being vulnerable themselves.
• Purpose: Let families in on the reasons why the home-school connection is important and how reading with their child will increase outcomes. Families that know we are connected because we share a common goal (their child’s success) may be more apt to participate.

Elementary Students: Engaging Families With Reading

Families are one of our greatest resources. Tapping into what they know about their child can be pivotal in providing a rich reading support system. Set the stage by communicating the value of a richness of input, which means selecting the most rich language to use in the home for reading and speaking. Reading can be fun and part of everyday life at home. When we read together, we build connections — especially when we take the opportunity to stop and discuss ideas.  

Aside from reading traditional books, families can engage in reading and making recipes together, playing games that incorporate reading, singing karaoke, and even watching television with the captions on. Reading together can also include reading wordless picture books and interpreting the illustrations. This requires analysis and engages creativity. Young MLEs are much like sponges: They absorb information from experiences. Reading at home is one of those experiences that has lasting consequences.

Secondary Students: Setting Routines for Reading  

Following are a few suggestions for building strong home-school connections through reading for secondary students. 

1. Schedule Reading Time

The best way that families of MLEs in secondary schools can support a love of reading is to schedule time for their children to read at home. Teachers can encourage families to create a routine where reading is part of the daily and weekly schedule.

2. Read to Siblings

If there are siblings, one way to create this routine is to have the sibling in secondary school read to their younger siblings from (age-appropriate) books that the older sibling is reading. In this way, even if the caretaker cannot read in English, the older sibling can help to cultivate a reading practice.

3. Read to Caretakers

Another way is for the student to read to their caretaker at night, if the caretaker is available in the evenings. Even if the caretaker cannot read in English, the learner can read to their caretaker and explain what is happening in the home or heritage language. If teachers meet with the caretaker during conferences, the teachers can encourage the caretaker to ask their child to engage in conversations as they’re being read to. This routine creates a culture of reading and fosters conversations about the book.

4. Create a Book Club

Finally, if families are literate in their heritage language and books in that language are available, a great routine is to have the family member and their child read the book as a book club. They can take turns reading the chapters on their own, and then come together to talk about the chapter. In this routine, we encourage a 1-week span between “book club” meetings.

5. Read in the Heritage Language

If the student cannot read the text but can understand the heritage language, we encourage creating a routine where if the caretaker has access to books in their heritage language, they retell the chapter to their children and encourage discussion about the characters, their problems, and their actions in any language they’re comfortable with.

6. Tell Stories Orally

Finally, if the caretaker cannot read in their heritage language but has a bank of stories about their lives or culture-based stories handed down from generation to generation, we encourage the caretakes to retell the stories to their children. While oral literacy does not have printed text, it is still a form of literacy with characters, problems, actions to solve the problem, actions that exacerbate the problem, and literacy devices. This oral storytelling approach cultivates a love around stories. This is the seed of oral narration builds the stamina, the imagination, and the enjoyment that is found in reading text.

In all of these approaches, we are finding ways for caretakers to cultivate a love of reading at home with the material, cultural, and linguistic resources they have. We invite you to look for more structures than what we have proposed here, but this is a start.

In the end, all children begin with the same number of words, but those who have been read to and those who have experienced the richness of input will have a deeper well to draw from.

Books hold the key. Families help to unlock the love of reading.