Teaching Beyond Spoken Words: Communicating With Bilingual Nonspeaking Children in the Classroom

This book presents strategies to help educators understand, communicate with, and support their multilingual nonspeaking children.

We often tell parents and caregivers to carry over specific skills and strategies that are taught to their children in classrooms and provider sessions, but rarely, if ever, do we encourage educators to carry over strategies that are occurring in the child’s family and community.

Centered on case studies of four families of nonspeaking bilingual children, this book demonstrates the vibrant communication systems families create to navigate daily life together. Each chapter includes teaching tools and blueprints for collaborating with students and families to best support bilingual nonspeaking learners―and all children―through expansive classroom communication.

Teaching Beyond Spoken Words includes graphic organizers and lesson materials for incorporating multimodal, multilingual communication practices into preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school classrooms and learning spaces.

Book Features:

• Centers the communication practices of bilingual nonspeaking children to rewrite how everyone communicates in the classroom.
• Offers a roadmap for expanding perceptions of communication, bilingualism, and meaning-making to improve learning for all students and educators.
• Includes “Teaching in Action” materials with every chapter to help readers enact communicative justice in their own learning communities and classrooms.

Lilly Padía is an assistant professor of raciolinguistic justice in early childhood teacher education at Erikson Institute in Chicago. She is the recipient of the 2025 Early Childhood Education Assembly (ECEA) Early Literacy Educator of the Year Award.