CAL President and CEO Diep Nguyen focuses on advice from teachers on how best to implement the Science of Reading for Multilingual Learners

For the past several years, a revolution in how we teach English reading has spread across the United States, mainly through state policies that mandated a reading curriculum based on the Science of Reading (SOR) that requires teachers to prioritize prescribed literacy teaching practices meeting the criteria of the SOR framework.  Among students being affected by these policies, more than 10%, or roughly 5.3 million, are English Learners (ELs) (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2024). Many more are Multilingual Learners (MLs).

As policies are passed that have direct impact in classrooms, we fail to give the appropriate weight to the voices and experiences of the individuals directly on the frontlines: the teachers in the classrooms.

A review of state-by-state SOR policies and how MLs are considered found that MLs are mostly absent or peripherally addressed (Howard, 2025). This lack of inclusion at the policy level, it turns out, resulted in negative consequences for these students when policies were implemented in the form of mandated curricula and instructional practices.

While the SOR momentum of implementation spread, bilingual and ESL educators began to notice that their SOR– prescribed curricula did not always serve their MLs well. Teachers serving MLs across the nation struggled to follow their respective state and district mandates, which are often described as “one size fits all,” while also tending to the everyday literacy development needs of their multilingual learners.

Read the full op-ed at Language Magazine (subscription required)