Multilingual Stance as a Journey, not a Destination

In the second blog entry for the Multilingual Stance series, Ester de Jong from the University of Colorado, Denver and Marianne Turner from Monash University discuss the benefits of thinking about multilingual stance as a continuum, rather than in opposition to a monolingual stance.

"I get all of this. I really know why it’s so important. But I'm a monolingual English speaker. What do I do?"

The quotation above – from a student in one of Ester’s teacher education courses on bilingual education – captures an important point. There are plenty of teachers who are more than willing to engage with plurilingual strategies in the classroom, but don’t believe that they have the necessary expertise.

The student’s question was the catalyst for Ester and her doctoral student Jiameng to conduct a systematic review of mainstream classroom practices, cataloguing the diverse ways teachers were engaging with students' home languages (de Jong & Gao, 2018, 2023). They found that home language use ranged from brief, transitional accommodations to practices that highlighted multilingualism as normative and a valued part of classroom culture for everyone. This review then led to a continuum that Marianne found very useful in her own work with teachers.

A Multilingual Stance Continuum

Ester and Jiameng created the multilingual stance continuum when they realised that these practices could usefully align with Schwarzer et al. (2003) four orientations to home languages in the classroom: (1) forbid, (2) allow, (3) maintain, and (4) foster/affirm.

At the far-left end sits the forbidding stance—actively discouraging or prohibiting students' home languages. Moving along the continuum, transitional practices are situated in the middle. These are the temporary accommodations many teachers make: "You can use your home language if you're really struggling with English" (allow) or they provide home language resources specifically for emergent bi/multilinguals (maintain). While important, these practices position home languages as scaffolds to eventually be discarded, and not assets to be developed and sustained. At the far end lies fostering/affirming home language practices, and this orientation positions multilingualism as the norm in class.

In Marianne’s research, she has found this continuum to be a useful way of acknowledging where teachers actually are, rather than demanding they leap immediately to an ideal they may not feel equipped to enact or their school might not support. The points in the continuum can be stepping stones towards considering multilingualism as the norm, but they are also important in their own right, and some of the points are more intuitive than others.

For example, permitting students to use home languages for their own learning is relatively straightforward for many teachers. Actively planning home languages into lessons to scaffold learning for multilingual learners is the next step and, although more demanding, the logic is generally clear. Teachers are helping students learn English by leveraging what they already know. The focus remains firmly on students’ English language learning. Marianne has found in her research that teachers work well with these ideas because the rationale is clear and aligned with their existing goals (Turner et al., 2023).

It’s also important to recognise challenges. Some content areas, such as teaching languages, can be naturally oriented to these kinds of strategies. However, in one study (Turner et al., 2022), Marianne found that pre-service teachers were concerned about disrupting the learning of monolingual students. Even though they wanted to affirm multilingual learners’ home language practices, they still positioned linguistic diversity as a problem rather than a resource.

Perhaps most striking in this study were the pre-service teachers who felt home languages shouldn't enter the classroom at all because of their own experiences. They had been former multilingual learners (Chinese international students) in Australian secondary classrooms themselves. They were concerned that students might not get enough English exposure; they might speak their home language all the time at school and not do well academically. This is a very important concern. Clearly, strategic use of home languages needs to enhance English language development when the societal language and language of academic success is English.

Moving Along the Continuum

Context is therefore an important consideration when moving along the multilingual stance continuum. A multilingual stance doesn't mean everything happens in home languages. The key is understanding when and how different language practices make pedagogical sense. Underpinning this is the need to consider multilingualism to be a resource for learning instead of a classroom disruptor.

A preliminary step to moving along the multilingual stance continuum is to get to know the students. This might seem like common sense, but assumptions made about students are often based on English proficiency. Sitting beside a student, getting to know them as an individual rather than a proficiency category, can bring their strengths, interests, and capabilities into view.

Another strategy involves developing metalinguistic awareness. Setting up activities where teachers and students are noticing cross-linguistic patterns and differences together recognises that the students know something valuable, and mutual awareness can grow. These experiences help teachers understand why their multilingual students use languages in flexible, integrated ways.

The more challenging shift is to make multilingualism the norm for everyone; that is to say, to make home languages pedagogically useful for all students, not just those who speak these languages. This can feel counterintuitive. Why should students engage with languages they don't speak? In their work, both Ester and Marianne seek to help educators understand how harnessing students’ language knowledge and experiences can build classroom community, develop intercultural understanding, and serve as a learning tool for everyone in context-specific ways.

A rapidly changing technological (GenAI) landscape is providing more opportunities to work with students’ language experiences whilst also emphasising the need to think about students’ processes of learning. The multilingual stance continuum provides a map rather than a rigid prescription: a way for teachers to see where they are and where they might go next, pointing toward ever more expansive possibilities. There is no end point: it’s the journey that counts.

References

de Jong, E. J., & Gao, J. (2018). Taking a multilingual stance: A continuum of practices. Minnesota TESOL Journal, 35 (1). Available at https://minnetesoljournal.org/taking-a-multilingual-stance-a-continuum-of-practices/

de Jong, E.J. & Gao, J. (2023) Preparing teacher candidates for bilingual practices: toward a multilingual stance in mainstream teacher education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 26 (4), 472-482, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2022.2119072.

Schwarzer, D., Haywood, A., & Lorenzen, C. (2003). Fostering multiliteracy in a linguistically diverse classroom. Language Arts, 80 (6), 453-460.

Turner, M., Tour, K., Keary, A. & Tran, L. (2023). Plurilingual Resource Map. Catholic Education Commission Victoria. https://figshare.com/articles/online_resource/Plurilingual_Resource_Map/23639775?file=41478564

Turner, M., Nguyen, M.H. & Premier, J. (2022). Embedding a multilingual stance in secondary teacher education: An exploration of learning as an affordance. Teaching and Teacher Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2021.103608