Connecting with Multilingual Families Through Thoughtful Family Engagement

Introduction

The students in our classrooms may come from different cultures than our own, hold different beliefs, and speak a different language at home. How the school halls and classrooms reflect our students’ and families’ experiences plays a key role in how effectively we can teach. Several resources and day-to-day efforts ensure that students and families feel heard and included to the school life, building an inclusive school culture for all students and families.

Bilingual Students in Numbers

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.

How to Integrate ELL Families and Multilingual Communication with the School

So, how do we ensure our schools are welcoming and accommodating spaces for multilingual learners and their families? 

Align Communication Practices and Policies With Family Needs

Federal civil rights law requires schools to communicate meaningfully with multilingual families.

Families have a right to understand information about their child’s education in a language they are comfortable using. Language barriers that prevent parents from accessing essential school information may constitute discrimination based on national origin.

Federal guidance emphasizes that schools are expected to take reasonable steps to ensure communication is timely, accurate, and understandable for parents with limited English proficiency. While the federal law establishes the expectation for meaningful communication, states have stepped in to provide more specific requirements.

California, Texas, and New York have policies in place requiring schools to communicate with families in a language they understand, especially when the information affects a child’s education.

In California, schools are required to provide translated written communication when 15% or more of students share the same non-English language, while still being expected to support communication needs for all families.

It is common to associate this responsibility with obvious materials such as enrollment paperwork or report cards. In reality, meaningful communication reaches much further. It also applies to everyday documents and interactions, including permission slips, parent-teacher conferences, disciplinary notices, special education services, and placement or acceptance into gifted-and-talented programs.

Therefore, schools should have a communication policy in place in regards to how to handle communication with ELL families. The practical implementation of the policy needs to outline the contexts where school administrators can provide multilingual translation tools and enable translation service, and how teachers should utilize these services. Teachers shouldn’t have to individually figure out how communication should be handled.

Identify Families’ Language Needs Early

As enrollment numbers are verified, schools need to identify the diverse language and translation needs that come along with these numbers. School’s first job: find out what the families’ language needs are.

To verify the language needed, administrators and teacher may include questions to back-to-school questionnaires such as, “What languages do you speak at home?” or “Does your family need any translation services during the school year?” Knowing the languages and proficiency levels of the families the school is serving will help to assess and gather the necessary resources to support multilingual communication.

Support Homeless ELL Families with Your McKinney-Vento Liaison

ELL families in your school may be experiencing homelessness. English learners are disproportionately represented among students experiencing homelessness. While they make up about 10% of the general student population, they account for roughly 17% of homeless students identified under the McKinney-Vento Act, according to SchoolHouse Connection’s report from 2021. This number represents an estimated 200,000 students nationwide.

Families experiencing homelessness may not always be able to provide full contact information at enrollment. When a phone number or email is unavailable, schools can take a flexible, thoughtful approach to communication.

• Try speaking with the parent at pickup or drop-off
• Send a note home with the student to ask about the best way to stay in touch
• Reach out to your district’s McKinney-Vento liaison, who may help connect the family with services that provide phone or internet access
• Be willing to adjust your communication methods to meet the family’s situation

Many families still have some access to a phone or the internet, though it may be limited to times when they can connect to Wi-Fi at a public library or another shared space. Responses may take longer, and follow-up—sometimes even through handwritten notes—may be needed. Even so, every family has the right to clear and consistent communication about their child’s education.

Offer Translation Support and Language Services Access

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.

• Check if your school system provides in-person interpreters for conferences or IEP meetings, or if they utilize phone or video translation services. 
• Check if your school communication platform include multilingual Text-to-Speech voice messages.
• Check if your school communication platform automatically translate written communication into parent’s home language?

Knowing the translation services available enables you to prepare ahead for teacher-parent communication and ensure families get the information they need. 

Use Intentional and Clear Written and Spoken Language

Using an intentional communication style in which school stakeholders focus on clear, concise language reduces errors and improves understanding.

Take note of the following when communicating with ESL families:

• Use clear, concise language in communication, especially when translation tools are involved. Short sentences and familiar vocabulary translate more accurately across languages.
• Avoid acronyms, idioms, slang, metaphors, and education-specific jargon, as the message carried in these phrases may be hard to translate.
• Be consistent in your wording when referring to specific events, roles, and programs so families don’t get confused.
• Try to speak at a measured pace and enunciate clearly during phone calls, meetings, and conferences. Fast-paced talking or quick, small talk often gets missed, leaving families to guess the meaning based on context rather than understanding the message itself.
• Check that your message was understood, rather than assuming comprehension from silence or polite agreement. Note that it is also possible that you misheard or misinterpreted the question the parent was trying to ask.
• Be mindful of your own listener bias around accents and speaking styles. An unfamiliar accent does not indicate limited English comprehension ability. Don’t comment on parents’ accents or speaking styles.

Move from Scattered Messages to Unified Communication

Many of the challenges multilingual families encounter are not solved solely by language translation. If school communication is already scattered and requires keeping up with multiple platforms, systems, and methods, ELL families are likely the first ones to drop out of communication. The challenges that affect many families are often experienced first by ELL families, highlighting the need for clearer, more consistent communication practices that work for everyone. Unified communication platforms where all communication and messaging lives in one place are easier for ESL families to navigate than scattered communication across email, social media, learning platforms, newsletters, and private messaging apps.

Build a Culturally Inclusive School and Classroom Environment

When schools decorate their hallways and teachers set up their classrooms for the new school year, the school communities can highlight their mission to be culturally inclusive for all students. Some ideas for classroom design are:

• Create bilingual classroom labels.
• Collaborate with your school librarian about acquiring books in students’ languages.
• 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 a concrete step to making the classroom a welcoming environment for everyone.

Support Cultural Inclusion Through Teaching and Leadership

While physical space design is a concrete way to showcase the school’s lived mission, cultural inclusion should extend beyond physical spaces. Integrated and project-based learning opportunities help students explore diverse cultures, perspectives, and lived experiences in respectful, age-appropriate ways.

Ongoing teacher professional development in cultural inclusion, along with clear alignment and visible commitment from school leadership, can be transformative in building positive school cultures where inclusivity is consistently reflected across classrooms, programs, and school-wide practices.

Create Tailored Events and Projects for Multilingual Families

In their book Building Parent Engagement in Schools (2009), authors Larry Feriazzo and Lorie Hammond describe how engaging with immigrant families and tapping into their cultural knowledge enriches the school community. Traditionally, immigrant or lower-income families may have been withdrawn from school’s regular volunteering activities due to cultural, language, or other barriers stemming from daily living circumstances. The authors use setting up and tending a school community garden as an example of a parent-led project that brings the community together. In their examples, the immigrant parents had far more experience with gardening techniques, gardening practices and tools than the school staff.

The project empowered the parents to take pride and share their cultural knowledge, which built valuable bridges between the school and home. Involving parents in their own way and not in stereotypical volunteering roles created authentic connections with the school. Feriazzo and Hammond emphasize that authentic engagement must stem from parents’ genuine interests to enrich the community.

Therefore, when reaching out to families for guest-speaking and knowledge-sharing opportunities. Consider the following when inviting parents:

• Tailor the opportunity to meet parents’ interests and knowledge. Maybe instead of guest-speaking, they would like to share a hands-on activity or take the class on a short field trip?
• Provide a flexible schedule to accommodate parent’s schedule.
• Use language translation services during the meeting if available.
• Integrate the event with what students are learning.
• Learn about barriers that may prevent parents attending school events.

Ideas for Multilingual Family Events

Multilingual Family Literacy Night

Connect with families through activity stations featuring storytelling, vocabulary games, and translation tools to celebrate home languages and support English learning.

Multilingual “How School Works” Orientation Night

Walk families through schedules, grading, attendance, and how to contact teachers or use school communication tools.

Multilingual Family Workshop Series

Offer short sessions for parents on school vocabulary, and how to support homework.

Cultural Heritage Night

Invite families to share food, traditions, and cultural displays to build a sense of belonging and community connection.

Multilingual Family Communication Night

Provide hands-on support with common technology questions. Show real school messages (newsletters, forms, alerts), where to find them, and how to respond.

Events in Partnerships With Community Programs and Organizations

Schools can bring community programs and opportunities closer within reach of multilingual families. ELL families benefit when schools partner with local businesses, city services, cultural centers, faith-based organizations, and nonprofits to provide practical support and skill-building for the parent community.

An example of strong ELL family engagement through partnerships comes from Port Washington, NY, where the Port Washington School District organized a family literacy night for ELL families in collaboration with the St. John’s University Project Leader Program. The event brought ample of resources and connections for ELL families including

• Multicultural books to foster literacy skills in both home languages and English for ELL families.
• Educational workshops and resources by dedicated professors, student volunteers from St. John’s, and the Port Washington World Languages Department.
• Connections from local community-based organizations such as CARECEN, the Port Washington Resource Center, Latina Moms Connect, the Port Washington Public Library, the Long Island Japanese Culture Center, Super Soccer Stars, and the Hispanic Counseling Center.

By bringing schools, families, and communities together, academic outcomes for ELL students can improve. Read a school leader’s perspective on the impact of community programs on school culture.

Enrollment Event of ELL Students

In Seattle, WA, Hazel Wolf K-8 School hosted a multilingual enrollment night to help ELL families enroll new students “to get computer access, help from interpreters, enrollment specialists and staff.” 

Reach Out to Multilingual Families for Feedback

How do schools know whether their communication efforts are actually reaching families? Family engagement teams can tailor their assessment questions to better understand how well school communication is reaching families of English Language Learners and how inclusive the school climate feels from a family’s perspective.

Teachers may personally reach out to families 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.

The Takeaway: Commitment to Communicate Enables Multilingual Family Engagement

Connecting with multilingual families is not just about translating communication, but also about integrating families into the school culture through thoughtful communication and family engagement practices.

Language translation tools and services create space for connections that enrich the school culture and support to student learning. Diverse, inclusive school cultures can be fostered by intentionally supporting multilingual families and teachers who communicate with them.