High-Quality Instructional Materials: A Texas Imperative for Emergent Bilingual Success
Across Texas, education leaders are navigating a landscape shaped by HB1605. As they navigate new adoption cycles, updated standards, and rising expectations for student learning, one strategy remains essential: high-quality instructional materials (HQIM). For the state’s more than one million Emergent Bilingual (EB) students, HQIMs play a critical role in ensuring access to grade-level content and supporting higher levels of academic achievement.
High-quality instructional materials are not simply collections of lessons or supplemental worksheets. They are standards-aligned, coherent, and content-rich tools that define what strong daily instruction looks like. Designed to support diverse learners, HQIMs integrate language and content development, embed scaffolds, and provide teachers with a clear sequence of lessons aligned to the TEKS and ELPS.
In Texas classrooms, where linguistic variety is a defining strength, this clarity matters.
When educators rely on well-designed materials, instruction becomes more consistent and more rigorous across classrooms. Teachers spend less time piecing together lessons and more time analyzing student work, planning for language development, and facilitating deeper learning. Most importantly, EB students gain dependable access to content that helps them grow academically and linguistically.
HQIMs provide guaranteed daily exposure to grade-level texts and tasks. Too often, EB students are given simplified work or isolated skill practice that delays access to meaningful learning. Research and statewide evidence show that emergent bilinguals progress faster when they engage with grade-level content supported by appropriate scaffolds. Not when expectations are lowered.
High-quality materials are intentionally designed to provide scaffolding that supports grade-level instructional content. They incorporate vocabulary routines, visuals, sentence frames, modeled academic language, and other tools that allow EB students to engage in rigorous instruction. Because these scaffolds are built into the lessons, teachers do not have to create them from scratch, allowing them to focus more deeply on monitoring student thinking and supporting language development.
When EB students engage consistently with grade-level content, their confidence grows, their language develops more rapidly, and their academic achievement improves.
For EB students, language development happens best when it is woven into grade-level learning, and not taught separately or in isolation. The ELPS require integrated practice in listening, speaking, reading, and writing across content areas. HQIMs make this integration clear and actionable. Strong materials model how teachers can support academic conversation, prompt students to explain their reasoning, and encourage the use of discipline-specific language. They show how language routines, such as structured partner discussions, response frames, and annotation strategies, can deepen comprehension while developing linguistic proficiency. This integration accelerates language growth and expands students’ access to content knowledge, which is essential for long-term academic success.
Dual language programs particularly benefit from HQIMs that include authentic Spanish texts, accurate Spanish foundational skills, and tasks that build on cross-linguistic transfer. These materials respect bilingualism as an asset and provide students with opportunities to strengthen literacy in both languages in meaningful ways. Foundational literacy skills are critical for reading success, but for EB students, these skills must be connected to comprehension and language. High-quality materials link phonics, word study, fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge-building into coherent instructional progressions.
For students learning to read in Spanish, HQIMs that reflect the language’s syllabic structure, orthography, and morphology help prevent the common mistake of applying English-based methods to Spanish instruction. When foundational skills are taught in ways that reflect the actual linguistic features of the language, EB students make faster and more accurate progress. By linking foundational skills to knowledge-rich content, HQIMs ensure that students are not only learning how to decode but also developing the language and background knowledge needed for deeper comprehension.
Districts across Texas implementing HQIMs with fidelity report stronger student participation, clearer instructional delivery, and improved collaboration among educators. Students experience a coherent progression of learning, and teachers are better equipped to support them.
These improvements directly impact EB students, who benefit from consistent access to grade-level work and a predictable structure for language development. National and state data regularly show that high-quality materials, when supported by aligned professional learning, lead to gains in reading, writing, and math, especially for multilingual learners.
Even the strongest materials require thoughtful implementation. The most successful Texas districts align coaching, PLC structures, professional learning, and observation tools to the curriculum. Teachers plan from the materials, leaders monitor student access to grade-level tasks, and professional development focuses on deepening instructional practice. This alignment ensures that EB students receive the language-rich, rigorous instruction they need across classrooms and grade levels.
Texas has a long history of leadership in bilingual education. With HB1605, updated ELPS, and increased access to quality materials, the state is positioned to make significant progress in instructional access. By prioritizing HQIMs and implementing them with coherence and fidelity, Texas education leaders can ensure that emergent bilingual students have the tools, opportunities, and support they need to thrive academically.
High-quality instructional materials are more than curriculum; they are an investment in the promise and potential of Texas’ students.
