The choice arrived at the kitchen table like a bill no one had warned them about. Keep their daughter in the Spanish immersion program she loved, or pull her out to get the reading help the school would not give her inside it. Wait and see, they were told. It was probably the second language.
It was not the second language. A reading difficulty is about learning to read, and that work is the same in Spanish, in English, or in both at once. The immersion program did not put it there, and dropping the program was never going to lift it back out. What the waiting did was spend something the family never got a refund on.
What it cost her was time. Not her intelligence, not her future, her time. A reading difficulty describes where a child sits today. It does not tell you where she lands after a year of the right kind of practice. Time is the one thing a good plan starts handing back.
TL;DR
- The immersion program did not cause her reading difficulty, and pulling her out would not have fixed it. A reading difficulty is about learning to read, which is taught the same way in any language. What the decision cost her was time.
- Wait and see was the expensive part, and it was not even the school’s to require. A school is not allowed to use a wait-and-see process to put off a special-education evaluation, and that district evaluation is free and yours to request in writing today.
- The lost ground is real, and it is recoverable. Reading is a taught skill, so the next move is to find the actual skill gap and aim short, daily practice straight at it, in whichever language the child is reading.
A reading difficulty is about learning to read, and that work is the same in Spanish, in English, or in both.
“– Laura Lurns
Why the second language was never the real story
The school’s reasoning sounds fair on its face. A child learning in two languages stumbles over reading, so the newer language looks like the obvious suspect. Here is what that misses. Spoken language and reading are not the same kind of skill. Children soak up talking by being around it, which is why immersion works so well for speech. Reading is different. There is no reading instinct to fall back on, in any language, so it has to be taught on purpose, step by step. Researchers like Stanislas Dehaene and Maryanne Wolf describe reading as a roughly five-thousand-year-old human invention. The brain never evolved for it, and builds it by borrowing circuits meant for other jobs. What the field calls dyslexia is a difficulty with reading and spelling words, and it lives in that learning-to-read work, not in the choice of language. That is why immersion did not create the difficulty, and why taking it away would not have moved it. The second language was a convenient place to point while the real gap sat and waited.
‘Wait and see’ had a price, and it was not the school’s to impose
Here is the part that should make a parent sit up. Waiting is not a neutral choice. Waiting has never taught a child to read. Teaching does. Researchers once pooled twenty-two randomized trials of reading help (Galuschka and colleagues, 2014). Systematic phonics was the only one that showed a clear effect. Reading difficulty answers to the right instruction, not to the passage of time. The International Dyslexia Association put it plainly in its 2025 definition: ‘language and literacy support before and during the early years of education is particularly effective.’ And the family was never actually required to choose between the program she loved and the help she needed. A school is not allowed to use a wait-and-see or response-to-intervention process to delay or deny a special-education evaluation. The U.S. Department of Education made that plain in OSEP Memo 11-07, back in 2011. The district evaluation is free to the family. It looks broadly at the whole child, not at one narrow slice. A parent is allowed to put the request in writing and keep a dated copy. You read how reading is actually taught, and you ask for it by name. The program stays. The clock stops.
When a bilingual child struggles to read, the first thing families hear is to drop the second language, as if that were the weight. In the families I sit with, it rarely is. I look at the work underneath, the turning of print into spoken language, because that is what reading is built on, and it reads the same in any tongue. The part I hate is the lost months. The hopeful part is simple: reading is teachable, and the teaching is the thing the waiting was standing in for.
Key Takeaways
A reading difficulty is about learning to read, so it shows up whichever language a child reads in. The immersion did not put it there, and leaving the program behind would not lift it out.
Wait and see is the expensive choice, and it is not even the school’s to impose. A wait-and-see process is not a lawful reason to delay a special-education evaluation, and that evaluation is free to the family.
Lost time is recoverable. Reading is a taught skill. The move now is to find the real gap and aim short, daily practice at it, in whichever language the child reads.
The school framed it as the program she loved against the help she needed. You never actually had to choose.
“– Laura Lurns
What to do now, in either language
Start where reading starts, with the sounds inside words, then the letters, then the two tied together. Short, daily, focused practice on that is the work the waiting was skipping. It does its job whether she is reading in English, in Spanish, or in both. You value a daughter whose love of two languages was never the thing holding her back. The system that made you feel you had to trade her bilingual world for the help she needed is the one you get to overrule, starting today. Nobody will ever advocate for your child as hard as you will. When reading is hard, we look at more than reading. The sounds, the page, holding words in mind. Our assessment asks about all of them, then hands back a plan that names the first skill to build and the order to build the rest. See where your child’s plan would start.
Common questions from parents
Did Spanish immersion cause my child’s reading problem?
Should I pull my child out of the immersion program?
We waited a year on the school’s advice. Did we ruin her chances?
How do I tell a real reading difficulty from a normal second-language lag?
