Should I read to my child in our home language, or only in English?

If you speak a language other than English at home, you've probably wondered whether reading to your child in your own language helps them, or holds back their English at school. Australian curriculum guidance and the research literature on bilingual literacy give a reassuring answer: keeping up home-language reading alongside English doesn't take time away from English. For most families, it's time well spent that supports both languages.

This matters for a lot of us. More than 5.5 million Australians, around one in four people, speak a language other than English at home, and roughly one in four children in early childhood settings grow up multilingual, including many First Nations children (ABS, 2021). Yet many parents get little clear guidance and quietly default to English-only, worried that mixing languages will "confuse" their child or slow down school reading. The evidence doesn't support that worry, and the Australian Curriculum actively encourages the opposite approach.

TL;DR

• Reading to your child in your home language does not slow down their English reading development. The leading theory in bilingual education holds that literacy skills transfer between languages under the right conditions.
• The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) states that maintaining a child's home language supports their English learning as well as their identity and family relationships.
• You don't need to be confident in English yourself to help your child's reading. Reading well in your strongest language is genuinely useful.
• A child codeswitching (mixing languages) while you read, or preferring one language over another, is normal and not a sign of a problem.
• The research evidence is strongest for some language pairings, notably Spanish-English, and thinner for others common in Australia, like Mandarin, Arabic and Vietnamese. Treat the advice below as the best available guidance, not an identical script for every language.
• If reading or language development doesn't seem to be progressing the way you'd expect over time, it's worth a chat with your child's teacher or an EAL/D specialist. This article supports that work, it doesn't replace it.

The short answer: home-language reading helps, it doesn't hinder

The dominant explanation in bilingual literacy research is often called the "interdependence" or "common underlying proficiency" idea, first proposed by researcher Jim Cummins. In plain terms, literacy-related skills and concepts in a child's first language and a second language aren't stored in separate, competing boxes. They draw on a shared underlying proficiency, so knowledge and skills built in one language can transfer to the other when the conditions are right (Cummins, via secondary academic sources). Practically, that means time spent building vocabulary, comprehension and a love of story in your home language is building a foundation that English reading can draw on later.

This is the framework Australia's own curriculum authority works from. ACARA's EAL/D Teacher Resource states that an EAL/D (English as an Additional Language or Dialect) student's home language should be "recognised and acknowledged as a legitimate" part of their learning, and that maintaining the home language is important "for their English language learning as well as for the preservation and development of their cultural identities and family relationships" (ACARA EAL/D Teacher Resource).

There's emerging Australian research behind this too. A national study from the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) looking at multilingual children in early childhood settings found that while many multilingual children thrive, those who start school without strong English proficiency experience developmental vulnerability at noticeably higher rates. The study explored what helps close that gap, both at home and in early learning settings (AERO, Promoting Equity for Multilingual Children in ECEC). A separate large AERO study tracking more than 110,000 NSW students learning English found that students who'd moved beyond the very early "Beginner" stage of English progressed exceptionally well. AERO's CEO Jenny Donovan pointed to this as evidence for the value of supporting and valuing first-language development for all students, not phasing it out (TESOL Australia, 2025 research summary).

Closer to the living room, a study of Korean-English bilingual children in Australia used parent questionnaires and video of shared book reading sessions to look at home literacy environments in both languages. It found that a rich literacy environment in a family's heritage language supports language proficiency in both the heritage language and English, along with broader conceptual language skills (Home literacy environment, Korean-English bilinguals). Reading well in Vietnamese, Arabic, Punjabi or Greek is part of the same road as English literacy, not a detour from it.

Why this reassurance matters for Australian families

Australia is a genuinely multilingual country, even if daily life can make English feel like the only language that "counts" at school. In the 2021 Census, 22.3% of people reported using a language other than English at home, with Mandarin (2.7%), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%) and Punjabi among the most common (ABS Cultural Diversity: Census, 2021). If your family speaks one of these languages, or any other, you're part of a very large group.

Once your child starts school, English quickly becomes their language of friendships, television and playground status, and it's easy to feel like you're swimming against the tide. Noticing your child start to resist home-language books, or answer you in English when you've asked something in your home language, can feel like a sign something's going wrong. Mostly, it isn't. It's a normal part of growing up bilingual in an English-dominant environment, and it's exactly the moment home-language reading matters most.

What this looks like in a real family's week

Consider a Melbourne family who speak Vietnamese at home, with a child in Year 1 learning to read in English at school. Home-language reading and school reading don't need to be treated as rival systems competing for the same slot in the evening. A simple, low-pressure rhythm might look like this:

• Most nights: a Vietnamese picture book or audio story, chosen for enjoyment, building vocabulary, comprehension and a love of story in the language the child knows best.
• School reading nights: the decodable or levelled English reader sent home, read as the school has asked, without needing to compete with or replace the Vietnamese reading.
• When the child resists Vietnamese books because English feels "cooler" at the moment: a carer reads a short section aloud in Vietnamese, then invites the child to retell it in whichever language comes easiest, valuing both rather than insisting on one.
• Weekends: a longer Vietnamese audiobook or story in the car, with no pressure around decoding at all, just listening, talking and enjoying the story together.

None of this requires the parent to be a confident English reader. It requires being a confident, engaged reader in whichever language they know best.

"But I'm not good at English myself, can I still help?"

Yes. This is one of the most common worries we hear from LOTE households, and it's worth stating clearly: you do not need to read in English, or even understand much English, to meaningfully support your child's reading development. ACARA's guidance frames EAL/D students as bilingual learners who are "already language learners in at least one other language", treating home language use as an asset to build on, not a gap to fix (ACARA, EAL/D students).

Reading with warmth, expression and genuine interest in your strongest language gives your child rich vocabulary, narrative structure, background knowledge and a model of what reading is for, all things that support comprehension once decoding skills are being taught in English at school. The English-specific decoding work (sounding out letters and blends, building reading fluency) is largely the school's job, done through structured phonics instruction and practice. Your job, if you choose it, is simpler and just as valuable: being the person who reads to your child, in the language that lets you do it best.

Codeswitching and resistance: normal, not a red flag

Two behaviours worry parents more than almost anything else, and both are well within the range of normal bilingual development.

Codeswitching, when your child mixes languages mid-sentence while you're reading aloud, or answers your home-language question in English, is not a sign of confusion or delayed development. Bilingual and multilingual children often draw on whichever language gives them the word or phrase they need in the moment. It tends to settle as vocabulary deepens in both languages, and in the meantime it's a sign of active bilingual processing.

Resistance to home-language books, particularly once school starts and English becomes the language of social status among peers, is also common. An Australian survey of parents raising bilingual preschoolers found that children in families with stronger biliteracy habits more often asked to be read to in the home language, likely reflecting the child's familiarity and comfort with it (Australian Parents' Aspirations for Biliteracy). That's a useful data point if your child is currently in a phase of preferring English: continuing to build a positive, pressure-free relationship with home-language books now is likely to pay off in stronger engagement later.

If your child is pushing back, try lowering the stakes rather than the exposure: shorter sessions, letting them choose the book, reading alongside an audio story rather than insisting on a cover-to-cover read, or letting them respond in English to a story you've told in your home language. The goal is to keep the relationship with the language alive, not to win every individual reading session.

Audiobooks in your home language, do they count?

Yes. Broadly the same logic applies to audiobooks as to reading aloud yourself: hearing stories in your home language builds vocabulary, listening comprehension and narrative understanding, all of which support literacy more generally. Audiobooks are a particularly practical option for carers who aren't confident reading aloud in their home language's script, who are juggling several children, or who simply want to vary the routine with a professionally narrated story in the car or before bed. They're not a lesser substitute for live reading, but a different, equally legitimate way of giving your child rich language exposure. StoryNest's resources library has more on using audiobooks well alongside a child's reading development, including when read-alouds and decoding work best as a team rather than competing priorities.

A caveat worth taking seriously: the evidence isn't identical for every language

It would be dishonest to suggest the research base is equally strong, or looks identical, for every language and every family. Two important caveats:

Not every language works the same way on paper. Literacy differs across scripts: not all languages are alphabetic, and children with some home-language literacy in, say, Mandarin or Arabic are learning to interpret print in genuinely different ways than children working in an alphabetic script like Vietnamese or Italian (ACARA EAL/D Teacher Resource). Transfer between languages is real, but it doesn't look identical for every language pairing.

Much of the strongest research isn't about our most common languages. A 2025 scoping review of intervention research for Australian dual-language learners found that for the most common home languages spoken by Australian families, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Punjabi, Greek and Italian, rigorous intervention research is close to non-existent. Most of the strongest studies instead focus on Spanish-English bilingualism, a pairing that's comparatively rare in Australian classrooms (AARE EduResearch Matters, 2025). That doesn't mean the general principles don't apply to Mandarin- or Arabic-speaking families (the curriculum guidance and underlying theory are language-general), but it does mean this is best available evidence rather than settled, language-specific proof for every family's exact situation.

There's also genuine academic debate about how language transfer works. Some translanguaging scholars have critiqued aspects of the "common underlying proficiency" model Cummins proposed. The version presented in this article reflects the mainstream, curriculum-endorsed view rather than an uncontested scientific fact: well supported and officially encouraged, but still an active area of research.

A simple weekly checklist for LOTE households

Questions parents and teachers ask

Will reading to my child in our home language slow down their English reading at school?

No. The leading theory and the Australian Curriculum's own guidance both point the other way. Literacy skills and concepts built in a home language form a foundation that can transfer to English under the right conditions, and ACARA states that maintaining a child's home language supports, rather than hinders, their English learning. Time spent on home-language literacy is not time lost to English.

My child mixes languages when I read aloud, is that a problem?

No, codeswitching during shared reading is a normal part of bilingual and multilingual development, not a sign your child is confused or behind. Children often reach for whichever language gives them the word they need in the moment, and this tends to settle naturally as vocabulary grows in both languages. There's no need to correct it mid-story.

Should we switch to English-only once formal schooling starts?

There's no evidence-based reason to drop your home language once school begins. If anything, the research suggests the opposite. AERO's research found that students who had progressed beyond the very early stages of English learning did exceptionally well, which the organisation linked to the value of supporting first-language development throughout schooling, not just before it. Continuing home-language reading alongside school English reading is well supported by current guidance.

I'm not confident in English myself, can I still meaningfully support my child's reading?

Yes. Reading with engagement and warmth in your strongest language gives your child vocabulary, narrative skills and a model of what reading is for, all things that support comprehension once English decoding is taught at school. ACARA's guidance treats bilingual home language skills as an asset for learning, not a barrier, so you don't need confident English to be a genuinely useful reading partner for your child.

Are audiobooks in our home language as useful as reading aloud myself?

Broadly, yes. Audiobooks in a home language build the same kind of vocabulary, listening comprehension and narrative understanding as reading aloud does, and they're a practical option if you're not confident reading in your home language's script or need to vary your routine. They're a legitimate addition to your home reading rhythm, not a lesser substitute.

My child only wants English books now, how do I keep our home language alive without a fight?

Lower the pressure rather than giving up the language altogether. Try shorter sessions, let your child choose the book or story, use audiobooks as a change of pace, or read a short section aloud yourself and let your child retell it in whichever language feels easiest. Research on bilingual Australian families suggests children with stronger ongoing exposure to the home language often come to ask for it more themselves over time, so staying consistent now tends to pay off later.

Does this apply the same way for every language, including non-alphabetic scripts?

The general principle, that home-language literacy supports rather than competes with English, is language-general and endorsed by Australian curriculum guidance. But literacy practices do differ by script, and the strongest research evidence is concentrated in a small number of language pairings (notably Spanish-English) rather than languages common in Australia like Mandarin, Arabic or Vietnamese. Treat the guidance as the best available evidence rather than proof tailored exactly to your family's languages.

Who do I talk to if I think my child needs more structured support?

If reading progress in English or your home language seems to be stalling, or you have ongoing concerns, your child's classroom teacher is the right first point of contact. They can advise whether an EAL/D specialist, school learning support team, or other professional assessment would help. Home-language reading and audiobooks are a genuine support to your child's development, but they work alongside, not instead of, structured teaching and professional advice when a child needs more targeted help.

---

Keeping a home language alive alongside English reading isn't an extra burden on top of "real" school reading: Australian curriculum guidance treats it as part of the same project. If you're looking for more practical, judgement-free guidance on reading aloud, choosing books or using audiobooks well, StoryNest's resources library has more on these everyday reading questions, and StoryNest for Schools has ideas for teachers wanting to bring home languages into the classroom as a recognised strength. You can also create a free StoryNest account to explore read-aloud and audiobook tools that support your family's reading routine, in whichever languages that routine includes.

Sources

• Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cultural Diversity: Census, 2021
• ACARA, English as an Additional Language or Dialect Teacher Resource
• Australian Curriculum, EAL/D students
• AERO, Promoting Equity for Multilingual Children in ECEC
• TESOL Australia, 2025, Important research supporting EAL learners effectively
• Exploring the influence of the home literacy environment on early literacy and vocabulary skills in Korean-English bilingual children
• Australian Parents' Aspirations for Biliteracy in English and Home Languages
• AARE EduResearch Matters, How to keep home languages learning
• Cummins, J., via secondary academic source, ResearchGate summary