This month’s Spotlight was contributed by Hub member Marguerite Lukes. She works at the intersection of research, policy and practice in language and migration. Based in New York City, Marguerite is Director of Research at the national non-profit Internationals Network for Public Schools and is part-time faculty in New York University’s School of Education, Culture and Human Development. She has written about language and power in the context of schooling and migration with Multilingual Matters, International Multilingual Research Journal, Journal of Latinos and Education, TESOL Journal, and has published chapters in Adult Language Education and Migration, The Arts and Emergent Bilingual Youth and Regimes of Belonging – Schools – Migrations. She is on the Board of Trustees of The Center for Applied Linguistics.
We often say that language is power. In truth, certain languages spoken in certain ways by certain people, have power. As linguists, we view language as an asset and a resource to be strengthened, maintained and protected. New York City, where I live, is “the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,” according to Ross Perlin in Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Languages in New York. Yet many public schools in New York, in much of the U.S. and many English-dominant countries consider the only language that counts to be English. What is lost? What is possible when we shift that dynamic?
The U.S. and its Relationship to Languages
The U.S. has long had a fraught relationship with its multilingualism. Despite having no official language, the US has a long history of using language — in particular languages other than English and varieties of English considered “non-standard” — as stand-ins for race and ethnicity. Generations of US students — including speakers of indigenous languages, Spanish, and Chinese — have been and continue to be marginalized due to their linguistic heritages. Rather than promoting linguistic diversity, policies in schools about who may speak what language and when have often sought to eradicate and silence the languages that students speak at home.
While the benefits of multilingualism have been documented at length, the U.S. national ethos shuns the very multilingualism that is endemic to the multilingual, multicultural United States. Xenophobia and draconian immigration policies have historically sought to abolish multilingualism. These have a chilling effect on both explicit and de facto language policies in schools. The roots of such language policies cannot be ignored: a national push for Foreign Language Learning for U.S.-born students runs parallel to English-only policies applied to multilingual learners, predominantly students of color whose first language is other than English. Deficit-oriented movements to maintain English as the sole language of instruction in schools (e.g., in California, Arizona and Massachusetts) have coincided in the public sphere with debates about immigration, immigrants’ rights, and U.S. national boundaries. English-only efforts targeting newcomers emerge parallel to multilingual programs that promote global citizenship in elite schools targeting wealthy students. Despite the widely recognized benefits of multilingualism, discrimination based on language is still widespread and can be seen frequently in media posts from across the U.S.
Immigrant students who speak languages other than English have long been racialized in the U.S., with languages like Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese being stand-ins for race and as a result, the objects of silencing. While the term “English learner” (EL/ELL) or “limited English Proficient” (LEP) is still found in policy documents, it masks the reality that languages other than “standard English” have long played a role as markers of lower status and a lightning rod for social stigmatization for language minoritized populations.
A Way Forward, Harnessing Languages
My organization, Internationals Network for Public Schools, a national nonprofit network that partners with public schools and districts to transform education for multilingual learners, serves more than 9,000 students in secondary schools nationally. A network of public educators in primarily urban, high poverty schools shares vetted practices for promoting equity for multilingual students, resulting in high teacher retention, excellent graduation rates, and excellent college going rates for its graduates. The Network supports educators on the ground to harness all of students’ languages as tools for learning.
Internationals Network’s secondary school students are newcomers to the U.S., hailing from more than 130 countries and speaking more than 100 languages. All states in the U.S. are required to capture home languages of students who are potential emergent English speakers using a home language survey. Students are tagged with one language alongside their status as English Learner, when in fact many are proficient in half a dozen languages when they enter school. Educators across the Network recognize that maintaining and developing home language alongside English is central to achieving educational equity. They employ an explicitly assets-oriented approach, actively reinforcing and leveraging all students’ languages and cultures to support their knowledge building, understanding of content, identity, critical thinking, relationships and well-being. To ensure effective instruction for multilingual learners, instructional practices combine English-language development, maintenance of students’ home languages, and explicitly elevate students’ home languages, ensuring their equal status to English. Educators harness the power and potential of all their students’ home languages to promote rigorous, engaging, relevant and age-appropriate learning that fosters critical thinking, deeper learning and academic success. Research reveals that most effective pedagogy incorporates students’ languages and cultures into the curriculum and uses home language instruction to anchor engaging, age- and developmentally appropriate activities. Put quite simply: multilingualism supports learning.
How to Harness Multilingualism
Teachers in many U.S. classrooms are often monolingual and many lament: “how can I teach a bunch of kids whose languages I don’t speak or understand?” The teacher does not play the role of lecturer or translator. School-based approaches to integrating students’ home languages are developmental (supporting growth in all linguistic repertoires), metalinguistic (making meaning across languages) and sociolinguistic (emphasizing and encouraging communication for real contexts and audiences). We recommend curricula, student groupings, and peer support, approaches that explicitly integrate opportunities for students to use, share and leverage their entire linguistic repertoire to construct meaning about content, the world, and their own understandings and identities.
Let’s work together to change the narrative around individuals who are new learners of English. Let’s remind our colleagues, family, friends that language is not a crutch or a barrier, but a tool and resource. To learn more about successful approaches to working with multilingual learners in schools and to access free resources, visit Internationals Network for Public Schools at https://www.internationalsnetwork.org/newcomer-resources/.