While researchers have long supported the multilingual turn in applied linguistics (May, 2013), practitioners have shown more reticence (Taylor & Snoddon, 2013). Weaving acceptance of multilingual diversity into language education requires individual and collective commitment, especially in foreign language (FL) classrooms in higher education. FL instructors' initial teacher education may not have recognized differences between teaching FLs to linguistically homogeneous as opposed to multilingual groups of learners; it may not have stressed multilinguals' unique ability to learn additional languages, or the implications of those abilities for FL teaching, leaving both teacher educators and novice teachers unaware of multilingual learners' metalinguistic ability, cross-linguistic awareness, or language learning advantages such as enhanced grammar learning strategies (Aronin and Jessner, 2015; Kemp, 2007). Additionally, instruction according to decades old teaching methods often aligned with monolingual ideologies that discouraged drawing on languages other than the FL being taught (e.g., no translation; Cummins, 2007). The latter ideology informed many teacher educators' views of drawing on multilingual learners' linguistic repertoires and abilities, and led to instructors developing positionalities that devalued non-standard varieties of the FL they were teaching – even their own (especially if they were linked to Indigenous languages; Despagne & Jacobo-Suárez, 2022). That is, FL instructors who experienced 'othering' themselves may have conflicting beliefs about the value of multilingualism, may undermine their own plurilingualism, and may pass on these views to the novice instructors that they teach (Heidenfeldt, 2015), which lessens the likelihood of novice instructors espousing pluralistic approaches to teaching FLs in university settings.
This talk describes a study designed to introduce novice teachers in university FL departments to self-reflection on the role their beliefs and ideologies play in how they orchestrate classroom instruction; specifically, on their views toward incorporating pluralistic instruction into their teaching. Building on Candelier's (2013) FREPA project and Auger's (2021) plurilingual language education framework, our study addresses two of nine teacher competences that ECML (2020-2022) proposes as essential to pluralistic teaching: (a) novice teachers' understanding of equitable, diverse, inclusive instruction, and (b) planning and implementing pluralistic approaches to FL teaching. The study design is patterned after Farrell's (2022) framework for reflective inquiry in that researchers are paired with novice FL instructors over the course of a term with the researchers guiding the novice instructors to deeply reflect on the broad notion of multilingualism, teaching multilinguals through pluralistic instruction, and the 'change process' (i.e., whether they view the approach as a temporary 'add-on' or the likelihood of them adopting it long-term). The novice instructors worked alongside the researchers in developing activities, trying out their feasibility, remediating problems as they arose, and reflecting on the process and results at the end of the evidence-based reflective inquiry cycle (Farrell, 2022). The first cycle was followed by a second to refine key questions and delve deeper into the reflective inquiry. This mixed methods study includes workshop and materials development, online surveys, focus group interviews, and both peer and ethnographic observation techniques. Data analysis is ongoing.
