Centering critical multilingual language awareness in language teacher education: towards more evidence-based instructional practices

Abstract

Critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) serves as a valuable heuristic for recognizing linguistic diversity and, ultimately, contributing to the transformation of social inequities. The current Special Issue examines how CMLA development can be fostered through evidence-based instructional practices in pre-service language teachers. Building on previous work of critical applied linguists, Prasad and Lory’s (2020) revised framework places the power domain at its core, thereby, unifying the other domains, including cognitive, affective, performance, and social, as identified by James and Garrett’s (1992). This reconceptualization of the five domains of CMLA forms the foundation for the empirical-based instructional practices to CMLA development in language teacher education, which are the focus of the current special issue. The six studies and two commentaries demonstrate how CMLA can move from pedagogical stance to evidence-based practices across various educational contexts worldwide. By creating opportunities for pre-service teachers to identify how language and power intersect in their respective lives and educational settings, the authors in the special issue contribute to an expanding CMLA pedagogical toolkit. This toolkit aims to counteract the prevalent deficit perspective on multilingualism, aligning instead with asset-based pedagogic approaches, the call to decolonize pedagogy and the broader call for social justice.

ABSTRACT (DUTCH)

Critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA, kritisch meertalig taalbewustzijn) is een waardevolle heuristiek om linguïstische diversiteit te (h)erkennen en uiteindelijk bij te dragen aan het wegwerken van sociale ongelijkheden. Dit special issue onderzoekt hoe de ontwikkeling van CMLA kan worden bevorderd door middel van onderzoeksgebaseerde instructiepraktijken bij toekomstige taalleraren.

Voortbouwend op het eerdere werk van kritische toegepaste taalkundigen plaatst het herziene raamwerk van Prasad en Lory (2020) het machtsdomein centraal, waarbij de andere domeinen, zoals geïdentificeerd door James en Garrett (1992), zijnde cognitief, affectief, performatief en sociaal, worden verenigd. Deze herconceptualizering van CMLA vormt het uitgangspunt voor de empirische studies in dit special issue. De zes studies en twee commentaren in dit nummer tonen aan hoe CMLA kan evolueren van een pedagogisch standpunt naar op onderzoek gebaseerde praktijken in diverse onderwijscontexten wereldwijd. Door kansen te creëren voor toekomstige leraren om te identificeren hoe taal en macht op elkaar inspelen in hun respectieve leef- en onderwijscontexten, dragen de auteurs bij aan een groeiende CMLA-pedagogische toolkit. Deze toolkit heeft als doel het gangbare deficit perspectief op meertaligheid te bestrijden en in plaats daarvan aan te sluiten bij assets-gebaseerde pedagogische benaderingen, de oproep tot een gedekoloniseerde pedagogie en de bredere oproep tot sociale rechtvaardigheid.

PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

Critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) is a useful tool for understanding the variety of languages spoken by children and communities. The current Special Issue examines how CMLA development can be fostered through evidence-based instructional practices in pre-service language teachers.

CMLA can help address and reduce social inequalities. Prasad and Lory (2020) provide a revised framework for CMLA that focuses on the role of power in language, and sees power as the central domain that binds the remaining domains (cognitive, affective, performance, and social) together. This framework is the basis of the six empirical studies in language teacher education, which make up the current special issue. In this collection, six studies and two commentaries demonstrate the impact of research-based teaching practices that use various meaning-making tools and practices to help future language teachers develop CMLA. The authors create opportunities for future teachers to see how language and power are connected in their own lives and in the schools where they work. These studies help expand the CMLA pedagogical toolkit, which aims to move away from seeing multilingualism as a problem and instead seeing it as an asset. This approach also aligns with the call for decolonizing the curriculum and social justice.

Keywords:

• Critical multilingual language awareness
• teacher education
• pre-service teachers
• assets-based pedagogy
• decolonizing pedagogy
• social justice

Introduction

The field of language education is seemingly fraught with precarity. In the US, where both of us (the authors of this article) currently reside and work, foreign language education, especially in higher education, appears to be under threat, a victim of falling student enrollment (Jaschik, 2018). Because of reduced state and institutional support, many smaller language programs have been eliminated at Institutes of Higher Education in this past decade. A conspicuous case in point is West Virginia University’s recent decision to close down its foreign language department, only to announce shortly afterwards that it would keep its Chinese and Spanish foreign classes open (Anderson, 2023). This back pedal decision was driven in part by neoliberal logic, namely the instrumental value attached to these two languages which were viewed as being able to contribute to student career advancement. Indeed, fluctuating enrollments are not particular to the US, and are often shaped in part by geopolitical decisions. In China, for example, because of ongoing political tensions between China and the West, the importance of English in the national core curriculum has been reduced by the Chinese government in an effort to contain English’s ideological influence (Yu & Kim, 2023). And in North American and European countries, the war in Ukraine has resulted in fewer students studying Russian (Lem, 2022), resulting in a shift in foreign language student enrollment at the tertiary level.

Regardless of context, we need to recognize that ideological partisanship and identity politics do play a pivotal role in determining the contours of language education. Nationalist, neoliberal, and assimilationist ideologies do impact language policies and practices (McIntosh & McPherron, 2023). And inextricably linked to language ideological manifestations in policy and practice are complex identity impulses (De Costa, 2016).

Critical multilingual language awareness: changing social inequities

That language, power, and ideology intersect with each other is certainly not a new revelation. Almost four decades ago in 1984, Hawkins published Awareness of language: An introduction, a book which underscored the value of linguistic nuance. This seminal work was extended by several applied linguists (e.g. Clark et al., 1990, 1991; Fairclough, 1989) through the notion of critical language awareness, and further expanded through the notion of critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA). CMLA, according to García (2017), is a valuable heuristic in helping teachers of multilingual students ‘recognize the linguistic diversity of children and communities, but also … question the concept of language itself, as legitimized in schools’ (p. 1). In highlighting the need to problematize language, García appeared to echo Clark and Ivanič’s (1997) assertion that ‘language awareness-raising should be to equip learners to contribute, through their language use, to challenging and ultimately changing social inequities, rather than reproducing the status-quo’ (p. 220).

CMLA development

Indeed, much of the CMLA work today stands on the shoulders of luminaries, such as Jim Cummins, whose pathbreaking book in 1996, Negotiating identities: Education for empowerment in a diverse society and corresponding book 25 years later in 2021, Rethinking the education of multilingual learners: A critical analysis of theoretical concepts, have helped us better understand the importance of foregrounding identity in language education. His contributions, along with those of many other established critical applied linguists, such as Ofelia García, and emerging critical scholars, such as Kate Seltzer, need to be seen in complementary juxtaposition to James and Garrett’s (1992) language awareness framework that identified five domains in the study of language awareness: the cognitive, affective, performance, social, and power. More recently, and adding a multilingual dimension to this original framework, Prasad and Lory’s (2020) revised framework placed the power domain at the center, one that binds the remaining domains (cognitive, affective, performance, and social) together. This reconceptualization of the five domains of language awareness forms the foundation for the empirical-based instructional practices to CMLA development in language teacher education, which are the focus of the current special issue.

Evidence-based work in language teacher education: an overview of the special issue

The six feature articles in this special issue (including the illuminating commentaries by Cummins and Seltzer) take things one step further by showing our readers how to graduate CMLA from pedagogical stance to research-based practices. In other words, these articles, which draw on studies conducted in different countries across several continents, demonstrate the ways that an asset-based pedagogical approach (e.g. Lucas et al., 2008), as enacted through a CMLA lens, can be implemented across various educational contexts. In their paper, ‘Nurturing critical multilingual awareness with pre-service (pre)primary teachers through an interdisciplinary, project based approach,’ Mary and Young illustrate how, through working with community members and families, and by adopting various creative measures (e.g. the creation of bilingual books, multilingual graphic stories, multilingual music collections, and designing posters incorporating elements from different writing systems), CMLA was developed among pre-service teachers in France. Collaborating with undergraduate English majors at a university in Hong Kong, Darvin and Zhang mobilized a different set of semiotic resources: YouTube videos. In their paper, ‘Words that don’t translate: Investing in decolonizing practices through translanguaging,’ the authors show how having their students create YouTube videos about Cantonese words that are ‘untranslatable’ into English afforded the former opportunities to (a) tap the latter’s multilingual repertoires, and (b) create a valuable translanguaging space to heighten linguistic awareness.

Cultivating student investment in their own multilingual identities is also the focus of López-Gopar et al.’s study, entitled ‘Unveiling the discourses of coloniality: Mexican student-teachers’ language awareness in personal stories and language practices.’ Like the students in Mary and Young’s and Darvin and Zhang’s studies, López-Gopar and colleagues reveal how the use of memes and textbook excerpts, as well as student teachers’ stories about (self)discrimination, enabled student teachers to investigate how coloniality is reproduced in their daily lives and in schools. What we observe in this study and other studies in the current special issue is the collaborative creation of power between teachers and students, with teachers taking on a stance of humility and acknowledging the lessons they can learn from their multilingual students. Such a pedagogical move—one that entails a reversed directionality of multilingual awareness—forms the thrust of Windle et al.’s paper, ‘Reciprocal multilingual awareness for linguistic citizenship’. By having pre-service teachers in Brazil reflect on linguistic variation and the social value of different accents, the student teachers in their study came to realize the imposition of imperialist standards being exacted on them. The significance of developing student teachers’ complex multilingual sensibilities assumes a different complexion in Prasad and Bettney’s paper, ‘Be(com)ing multilingual listeners: Preparing (monolingual) teacher candidates to work with multilingual learners in mainstream classrooms’. Following an innovative programmatic exercise that had their teacher candidates participate in 30 h of language learning and subsequently write reflections on their language learning experience, the authors report that their participants grew in their awareness of several factors related to the CMLA domain of power. That teacher reflexivity is vitally important is also communicated in the study by Van Gorp et al. In their paper, ‘The emergence of critical multilingual language awareness in teacher education: The role of experience and coursework,’ the authors describe how a range of pedagogical tasks deployed in a semester long TESOL practicum course helped both their teacher educator and pre-­service teacher participant come up with ways to address a prevalent monoglossic (English) bias in school and society. The coursework for the pre-service teacher included assignments that entailed learning about the multilingual communities in which they were embedded, reflections of their own personal funds of knowledge, and weekly reflections of course readings.

Toward a praxis of centering CMLA development

What is common across the six empirical studies is how the teacher and teacher educator participants designed opportunities for their students to identify how language and power intersect in their respective lives and educational settings. Also notable across all the contributions to this special issue is the emphasis on praxis; that is, while all authors advocate an asset-based pedagogical approach, readers will see how theory is nicely interwoven with practice in the studies. Translanguaging, for example, prominently featured in the study by Darvin and Zhang as well as that by Van Gorp et al. (for a recent theorization of translanguaging within a broader decolonial agenda, see Cinaglia & De Costa, 2022). At the same time, the articles also give valuable insight on how to decolonize pedagogy (see also De Costa et al., in press; Phyak et al., 2023), which is part of a growing and longstanding call for an epistemic break from the Global North (e.g. Heugh et al., 2021; Kumaravadivelu, 2012). This move to decolonize pedagogy is certainly aligned with the educational agenda to promote CMLA. In keeping with this suggestion to situate CMLA research within a wider critical educational landscape, we also invite readers to make connections with adjacent calls for advocacy (e.g. De Costa & Uztuk, 2023; Frijns et al., 2018; Linville & Whiting, 2019) and social justice (e.g. Avineri et al., 2018; Li Wei, 2023; Ortactepe Hart & Martel, 2020). If anything, these six studies and preceding research on critical language awareness have shown us that overturning a prevalent deficit perspective to multilingualism and, correspondingly, multilingual users is undeniably a Herculean effort. Teacher education programmatic innovation of the type and quality described in this special issue constitutes a good start. But we need to build our arsenal of evidence-based practices and alongside that develop helpful pedagogical resources (e.g. Bolitho & Tomlinson, 2005; García et al., 2016; Slembrouck et al., 2018) that teachers can easily adapt for and apply in their classrooms. An expanded CMLA pedagogical toolkit is absolutely essential if we are to make deep and successful inroads into CMLA development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter I. De Costa

Peter I. De Costa is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages & Cultures and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. He is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly and the President Elect of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.

Koen Van Gorp

Koen Van Gorp is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and Less Commonly Taught Languages Coordinator in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, & Cultures at Michigan State University. He is the founding co-editor of TASK. Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning.