Remediation reform is an influential policy movement in U.S. higher education that aims to increase college completion rates. It is promoted by wealthy "strategic" neoliberal philanthropies that fund a number of intermediary non-profit organizations to influence legislators, policymakers, and administrators to adopt their policy goals (Buffett, 2013; Tompkins-Stange, 2016). College reading and writing course requirements have been a major focus of this movement, particularly prerequisite "developmental" courses for entering students who are deemed underprepared for college (Bailey, 2016; Ness et al., 2021). However, the policy implications of the remediation reform movement (RRM) remain unclear for the growing number of multilingual students entering U.S. higher education, particularly emergent English multilinguals (EEMs) who are still in the process of developing college-level English proficiency (Bunch et al., 2020; Hodara, 2015; Ruecker, 2015).
To address this gap, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of policies regarding multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and linguistic justice and equity on the websites of three prominent RRM organizations. This approach assumes that language education policies are inherently ideological, both growing out of and contributing to broader societal values, attitudes, and beliefs about languages and their speakers (Barakos & Unger, 2016; Wodak & Meyer, 2016). Examining 191 webpages and linked documents, the study sought to document explicit and implicit language ideologies underlying these organizations' reform initiatives and policy recommendations. A "lexical field" (Machin & Mayr, 2012, p. 30) or "keyword" analysis (Holborrow, 2013) of the corpus found that national RRM policy discourse consistently failed to address multilingual and EEM college students or forms of language instruction or support for them. Appraisal and multimodal analysis of text and graphics on webpages showed that RRM intermediate organizations positioned themselves as agents of diversity and social justice in higher education while at the same time framing "diversity" and "equity"in ways that excluded linguistic diversity, multilingualism, or EEM students. Intertextual links in discourse across websites and documents served to maintain English monolingualism as the normative medium and goal of U.S. college writing instruction. Overall, we find that RRM policy discourse implicitly reflects a deep and pervasive English monolingual ideology at odds with current scholarship and policy recommendations in college composition (e.g. CCCC, 2014; Horner et al., 2011; Inoue, 2019) and second language writing (e.g. Canagarajah, 2013; Matsuda, 2006; Ortmeier-Hooper & Ruecker, 2017) as well as the movement's own self-image. However, we also found that the demographic and legislative context of individual RRM organizations was an important mediating factor in the extent to which they explicitly recognized EEMs or other multilingual students.
Based on these findings we explore implications for the increasing influence of neoliberalism and the strategic philanthropy industry on language education policies in higher education. We suggest ways in which college researchers, instructors, and policymakers can counter English monolingual ideologies underlying RRM policy initiatives, and develop more linguistically just educational policies for EEM and multilingual students.
