Iliana Alanís and Irasema Salinas-González

As of 2026, about one in three preschool-age children in the United States is a multilingual learner, meaning they are growing up speaking a language other than English at home. Given this growing population, many early childhood educators continue to seek effective ways to support this group’ s linguistic, social, and academic development. However, instruction for emergent multilingual learners remains underrepresented in professional learning. This situation creates both a challenge and an opportunity to better support multilingual children from their earliest years.

For the past three decades, we( the authors) have partnered with preschool-to-grade-5 dual language educators to implement highquality bilingual programs. More recently, we’ ve focused our work on preschool classrooms, where professional learning in this area is often limited. We’ ve found that preschool teachers are often well-versed in research-based strategies, such as open-ended questioning. But many wonder when and how to apply language development strategies throughout the day with young multilingual children.

In this article, we show how professional development can help educators grow in teaching multilingual learners. We provide examples taken from our own work in a school district, described in“ Our Context and the Interdisciplinary Biliteracy Sequence.” We present ways that program administrators can work with preschool educators of multilingual learners to replicate the ideas in their own settings. Although these strategies can be implemented in any preschool program, they’ re crucial for scaffolding multilingual learners and drawing on their skills across languages.

50 Educating Young Children

Fall 2026