How to Reach ESL Families Through Better School Communication

In my very first year of teaching, I also had my first experience working with a bilingual family new to navigating the public school system. Each day, I heard my student and his mother exchanging their morning goodbyes in Thai, the language they spoke at home. While my student spoke English fluently, his mother was still working on her conversational English.

Luckily, my school’s LMS would translate our messages back and forth from Thai to English, so we made things work for a while. 

At parent-teacher conference time, my school’s ELL teacher told us about the district’s phone interpretation service, and I reached out to this mother to see if using it would be helpful for her.

She agreed, and we spent our conference time speaking through a phone interpreter about her son’s incredible progress in kindergarten. Before we hung up our call with the translator, she asked them to tell me, “This was so helpful. I felt like I could really understand all this information. Thank you so much.” It was a bittersweet moment. I was so glad that she felt like our conference was productive, but I also wished that I had known about our resources earlier so that she could have felt this way all along! 

The Facts

The students in our classrooms come from different cultures than our own, hold different beliefs, and sometimes even speak a different language at home. How our classrooms reflect our students’ and families’ experiences plays a key role in how effectively we can teach. While a language barrier can feel daunting, there are several resources and day-to-day efforts we can make to ensure that students and families feel heard in any language.  

Childstats.gov reports that in 2021, 21% of school-aged children in the U.S. speak at least one language other than English at home. This equates to 1 in 5 children, so it’s safe to assume that we will have a student whose family may have limited English proficiency in our classrooms during any given school year. This also varies widely across the country, with the highest numbers of bilingual students in California and the lowest in West Virginia, as reported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. 

By law, multilingual families have a right to access information about their child’s education and progress in the language they best understand. The more obvious applications of this are ensuring that things like report cards and enrollment information are translated appropriately, but this also extends to documents like permission slips, parent-teacher conferences, and acceptance into gifted and talented programs. These laws can, and should, directly impact the day-to-day operations of our schools and classrooms!

Welcoming Multilingual Families

So, how do we ensure our schools are welcoming and accommodating spaces for multilingual learners and their families? Beyond just the steps that schools must take by law, there are many ways to ensure they feel like a significant part of your school community. Your first job: find out what your families’ language needs are. This should already be part of your enrollment packet, but you might also consider adding items to your back-to-school questionnaires like, “What languages do you speak at home?” or “Will you need any translation services during the school year?” Knowing the languages and proficiency levels of the families you’re serving will help you begin gathering the necessary resources.

With this information in mind, as you decorate your hallways and set up your classroom for the new school year, you can ensure they are inclusive of your students’ home languages. Create bilingual classroom labels or find a pre-made option on Teachers Pay Teachers. Collaborate with your school librarian about acquiring books in these languages, or add some to your personal classroom library. Add welcome signs that include greetings not only in English but also in the languages spoken by the students throughout your school. Acknowledging your school’s language diversity is an excellent first step to making it a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

Accessing Translation Services

Because of the laws around educational access for multilingual families, public school systems should have translation and interpretation services available as part of their Communications or ELL departments. Familiarize yourself early with the resources you have at your disposal.

Does your school system provide in-person interpreters for conferences or IEP meetings, or do they utilize phone or video translation services? Does your school system have a designated team that translates documents like permission forms, newsletters, or parent handbooks? Knowing this enables you to prepare ahead for meetings and ensure everyone gets the information they need. 

For your day-to-day communication, check with your multilingual families to see how they prefer to communicate. Many will prefer to communicate by text or email, so they can use translation apps to quickly read and respond to your messages.

Some learning management systems and communication apps have translation interfaces built into them, so you can communicate without taking extra steps in between. For example, School Signals offers translation directly within both its School Feed and Classroom features. When a parent selects their preferred language in the app, all posts and notifications are automatically translated and delivered in that language.

When it comes to face-to-face communication with your multilingual families, there are a number of apps available that can translate your conversations from one language to another. You simply activate the microphone on the app and speak into it, and the app will either translate it into written form or aloud for the person you’re speaking with. While these apps are not perfect, they are a good way to communicate briefly about students’ learning or behavior at drop-off or pickup time.

Reaching Out to Families for Input

My best advice to teachers and schools that work with multilingual families is to ask them for input. It never hurts to check in from time to time to ask, “Is there anything else you need?” or “Is there anything we can be doing to make this a better experience for you?” Sometimes, all it takes is a genuine invitation to make families feel comfortable letting you know what they need from you.

If you are not part of a public school system or find yourself lacking in multilingual resources, don’t hesitate to ask your families for help! While we don’t want to burden families with extra work, you will often find that parents are happy to quickly translate words or phrases for you to use in your classroom or share stories/cultural events that are special to them. They want to help their children feel at home in your classroom as much as you do! 

Encourage your families to continue sharing their language with their children at home. Maintaining access to a second language is not only important for children to stay connected with their families and culture, but it also opens many doors for them in the future. As teachers, we are influential figures in children’s lives. When we celebrate what makes them unique, we add to their inner voice and help them view those things as special, too. 

Epilogue

I recently attended my kindergarten class’s 5th grade graduation. After the ceremony, I saw my former student’s mom waving excitedly to me from across the gym. She brought her son over, and we all celebrated how much he had grown about the changes in our lives over the past few years. Even though I had changed schools in the five years since I was this child’s teacher, the connection that this family and I had created was enduring. She and her son had a great experience in elementary school and were thriving. He’s off to middle school, and I’m cheering them on.

Resources

For more information on helping multilingual families feel welcomed in your school, here are a few more resources to explore:

ELL Resources by State
https://www.colorincolorado.org/ell-basics/state

Strategies & Resources for Welcoming and Engaging Families from the Multilingual Learning Toolkit
https://www.multilinguallearningtoolkit.org/strategies-resources/welcome-and-engage-families/

U.S. Department of Education English Learner Toolkit https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oela/english-learner-toolkit/index.html

U.S. Department of Education Fact Sheet https://www.colorincolorado.org/sites/default/files/dcl-factsheet-lep-parents-201501.pdf