Supporting Multilingual Learners Through Rigorous Literacy Instruction: What’s New in STARI
I’m not a natural language learner. I studied Spanish for six years before living in Spain finally made me bilingual, and I’ve never forgotten how it feels to sit in a room where the language is moving faster than you can hold onto it.
That memory is why I became an advocate for students learning English. It’s also the lens I brought when I joined the STARI team here at SERP.
STARI is SERP’s Tier 2 literacy intervention for middle and high schoolers. The first time I worked through it, I kept running into old friends: Local News by Gary Soto, How to Eat a Poem, The Skin I’m In. These were books I’d taught as an ESL teacher in Washington, DC and Miami.
I recognized something else, too: the trust STARI places in students and teachers. Whole books read in full. Real class time for sustained silent reading. Partner talk that’s actually about ideas. A teacher’s edition that guides without scripting every word. Mostly I thought, I wish I’d had this in my classroom.
I also saw, fairly quickly, where my multilingual students would’ve needed a little more to get all the way in.
So when I heard that one of the most common requests from teachers was more support for multilingual learners, I knew where I could help.
The False Choice
Here’s the bind a lot of materials put us in: support your language learners, or keep the work rigorous. Pick one.
Most educators have felt that tension. I’ve felt it. I’ve watered a text down to make it “accessible,” knowing I’d traded away the part that made it worth teaching.
That choice does real harm. Language learning isn’t a measure of intelligence. When we thin a text out, we strip away the very thing a student came to learn. Multilingual students are capable of hard, demanding, worthwhile work. They simply deserve more doors into it.
So when we talked about revising STARI, the team was aligned. We didn’t want STARI to ask anyone to make that trade.
The supports launching this summer help multilingual learners get into complex texts, talk about them, grow academic vocabulary, and write with more control, all without thinning out the texts or the thinking. The aim was never to simplify STARI. It was to open more ways in.
Picture Support for New Vocabulary
Vocabulary does a lot of quiet work in comprehension, and that’s especially true for students building English while they read.
We’ve added images for many of the new and harder words students meet, giving them a second route to meaning alongside the definition on the page. For teachers, a picture is also a fast way into a conversation, with no stopping the lesson to deliver a vocabulary lecture.
Language Dives
We’ve woven Language Dives throughout the curriculum.
A Language Dive slows down on one sentence worth slowing down on. Students and teacher take it apart together (why this word, why this order, how the sentence makes its meaning) and then put it back together.
These aren’t grammar drills bolted onto the reading. The sentences come straight from the text students are already in, so the language work and the comprehension work turn out to be the same work.
Supports Built into the Lesson
Beyond the new materials, you’ll find multilingual learner supports right inside the existing lessons: small, specific suggestions for reading, discussion, vocabulary, and writing.
They don’t send you down a separate track or hand you a second lesson to plan. They make the routines you’re already running land for more of your students.
What Support Actually Means
When we talk about supporting multilingual learners, the conversation tends to jump straight to scaffolds. Scaffolds matter. But the deeper question is whether a student gets to do the same demanding, interesting work as everyone else in the room.
Language grows through use. Students build it by arguing a point, explaining their reasoning, working out what a text is doing, and writing for a reader who will actually read it. That research-based principle is the thinking behind every one of these supports: more ways in, not less to do.
We’re not pulling the complexity out of the room. We’re handing students what they need to meet it. I think about the students I taught in DC and Miami, and the ones sitting in classrooms across the country right now, and I want every one of them to have access to instruction this rich.
The revised STARI materials, with new multilingual learner supports, launch June 30. If you teach multilingual learners, I hope you’ll see your own classroom in this work. Come explore it with us.