Small Groups That Work: When Do They Accelerate Learning for Multilingual Learners?
Small groups can accelerate learning for multilingual learners—or quietly reduce access to language and content. Learn when they work and how to design them well.
Small groups can accelerate learning for multilingual learners—or quietly reduce access to language and content. Learn when they work and how to design them well.
Small-group instruction is a staple of elementary literacy. More than 90% of teachers report pulling small groups three to five days a week, often consuming the bulk of a 120-minute literacy block. Yet research continues to reveal a paradox: small groups can accelerate learning—or quietly undermine it.
The variable isn’t whether small groups “work,” but when they work, under what conditions, and for whom. For multilingual learners, the stakes are even higher because time is both literacy and language.
Webinar Recording: Part 1 :
Why Small Groups Matter More Than Ever in Elementary Literacy
Webinar Recording: Part 2:
Small Groups that Work: The Science Behind the Results
By third grade, the reading ability range within a single classroom can span several grade levels. Diverse needs make small groups appealing—and precision makes them effective. But time and opportunity are not distributed equally.
When multilingual learners are pulled from science and social studies to attend leveled intervention groups, they lose knowledge-building opportunities that later drive comprehension. When centers rely on independent, silent tasks, students lose oral language practice that fuels vocabulary and morphological awareness. These opportunity costs accumulate across the year—and across years.
When small groups are designed without attention to opportunity cost, multilingual learners disproportionately lose access to language-rich, knowledge-building instruction. Over time, these lost minutes reduce exposure to academic vocabulary, discourse, and content essential for long-term comprehension.
This is not a failure of small-group instruction itself, but a system design challenge. Districts that prioritize intervention blocks without protecting content and language development risk undermining their equity goals.
When well designed, small groups allow teachers to target specific skills, provide immediate feedback, increase practice opportunities, and boost student talk time. Research consistently shows that combined whole-class + small-group instruction outperforms whole-class instruction alone, particularly when instruction is skill-specific and time-bound (Duke & Goldenberg, 2023).
For multilingual learners, these benefits extend beyond decoding and fluency. Oral rehearsal, vocabulary, morphology, prosody, and cross-linguistic noticing all gain lift when talk and feedback are central. Small-group instruction is not remediation—it is acceleration.
Instructional structures that increase talk, feedback, and purposeful language use directly support academic language development. This reinforces the importance of aligning instruction to multilingual standards rather than isolated skill practice.
Scholars caution that small groups can harm learning when implemented as routine rather than design. Rotations consume instructional minutes. Ability grouping can become a sorting mechanism that locks students into permanent “low” groups. Silent centers reduce language exposure, and pull-outs during knowledge-building subjects compound inequities.
In a typical 120-minute literacy block, transitions alone can consume up to 20 minutes—leaving vulnerable readers with less teacher-led instruction and less feedback than their peers (see Schmoker & Shanahan, 2023 via Education Week).
The issue is not whether small groups exist, but how much high-value instruction students actually receive. This connects directly to assessment accuracy, growth trajectories, and reclassification outcomes for multilingual learners.
An evidence-based model begins with whole-class instruction. Whole-group lessons are efficient for explicit phonics, spelling, read-alouds, discourse, and content knowledge. After a 20–30-minute whole-group lesson, a limited number of targeted small groups provide focused, high-impact practice.
Students who need the most support receive more total instruction—not less—while remaining connected to grade-level vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. For multilingual learners, preserving access to knowledge-building content is non-negotiable.
This structure prioritizes dosage, feedback, and talk time while preserving coherence across the literacy block—an essential leadership condition for effective multilingual learning systems.
Effective grouping depends on clarity of purpose. Skill-based grouping targets what actually changes learning—decoding, encoding, oral language, morphology, prosody, or comprehension monitoring—rather than static reading levels.
Groups should be flexible, short-term, and responsive to evidence of mastery.
Flexible, data-driven grouping prevents multilingual learners from being locked into permanent tracks and supports more accurate assessment, growth monitoring, and reclassification decisions.
Teachers, coaches, and leaders do not need to abandon small groups. They need to refine them.
Research suggests:
Leaders can protect literacy blocks from fragmentation and ensure Tier II and Tier III supports occur inside the block rather than cannibalizing content instruction.
District Leaders
Audit small-group structures to ensure precision without loss of access.
Policymakers
Support literacy models that protect instructional time and knowledge building.
Community Members
Advocate for designs that expand opportunity rather than sort students.
Aspiring Leaders
Understand that effectiveness is determined by system design, not scheduling habits.
Together, these perspectives reinforce a shared conclusion: the real levers are efficiency, opportunity cost, and equitable access to language-rich instruction—especially for multilingual learners.