How do we best mobilize learners’ multilingual identities in language policy, teaching, and learning? This colloquium draws together leading international scholars in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language teacher education to explore language policy, teaching, and learning approaches that foreground the learning needs and changing identities of multilingual language learners. 

Presenters in this colloquium focus on these issues in relation to Australasia, Oceania, and Asia. They will critically examine the apparent ongoing tensions between approaches that foreground multilingual learner identities and language use and the still predominant monolingual ideologies underpinning so much existing language policy and pedagogical practice in these contexts.  Each presenter will address these issues in relation to their own contexts as well as making explicit interconnections at the macro, meso, and micro levels to illuminate useful connections, as well as ongoing points of contestation, among language education policies, language learning and teaching, and the identities of multilingual language learners.

. The key objectives of the colloquium then are to:

1. highlight apparent ongoing tensions between teaching and learning approaches that foreground multilingual learner identities and language use and the still predominant monolingual ideologies underpinning so much existing language policy and pedagogical practice;
2. bring attention to disparities among planned language-in-education policies, their implementation, and their perceived and real outcomes in multiple geopolitical contexts;
3. report on the (un)intended teaching and learning practices that stem from policy decisions made at the top-down meso/macro-levels;
4. examine the mobilization of multilingual language learner identities as central participants in the policy-learning-identity nexus; i.e., who they are, and whom they become.

Chair: Dr. Mi Yung Park

Discussant: Prof. Stephen May

Presenters (in order):

Prof. Joseph Sung-Yul Park

Affect as method: Mobilizing subjectivities for a politics of refusal

This presentation considers affect as a key for mobilizing multiple identities of language learners towards a politics of refusal against colonial and capitalist subjectivities of language. While recent research has focused on affect as a lens for understanding language education and language policy, this presentation argues that affect is not simply an aspect of identity to be studied, as it can open up spaces for reflecting on, researching, and refusing subjectivities that reproduce oppressive relations of power. Focusing on the case of learning English as a hegemonic global language, and drawing from work on decolonial, feminist, and other revolutionary movements that highlight the disruptive potential of affect, the presentation explores how a focus on affect can serve as method — lived, embodied sites of tension with injustice and inequality that can guide language learners, educators, and researchers toward social transformation, political action, and relations of solidarity via their linguistically mediated identities.

Assoc. Prof. Prem Phyak

Multilingual education, language ideology and epistemic justice

This presentation adopts a decolonial perspective to discuss how multilingual education policies need to go beyond language-centricism and pay attention to epistemologies that students from diverse linguistic, racial, and cultural backgrounds possess. Despite a significant body of knowledge in multilingual education, the nation-states and schools around the globe still adopt and implement the policies that perpetuate monolingual ideologies. Such policies not only affect the learning trajectories of multilingual students, particularly from Indigenous/minority communities but also misrecognize their epistemologies. Drawing on theories of language ideology and epistemic injustice, this presentation critically examines the ideological challenges in the creation and enactment of multilingual education policies and pedagogies in the Global South, drawing on the case of Nepal. This case is examined for two reasons. First, the country has adopted a multilingual education policy since the early1990s, at least in the text, recognizing the importance of ‘mother tongues’ in education. Major aid-agencies (NGOs/INGOs) have been supporting the government to promote ‘mother tongue education’. Second, strong linguistic activism for mother tongue-based multilingual education from Indigenous communities has a long history in the country. However, schools barely create space for Indigenous languages in the classroom. More strikingly, there is a growing trend of implementing English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policy from the first grade. This presentation thus critically examines the coloniality of monolingual ideologies and discusses how decolonial perspectives can offer insights into reframing multilingual education policies that recognizes epistemic diversities.

Dr. Corinne A. Seals

Positive identity practices in heritage language learning through flexible multilingual approaches

Heritage language (HL) teachers must make difficult choices regarding which language variety/ies they should teach and how much immersion to use. HL teaching often focuses on students whose families immigrated to a host land that has a different dominant societal language from the respective homeland. However, HL teaching also includes cases where the students have Indigenous heritage and are seeking to reclaim their rights to their HL(s) in a postcolonial context. In both situations, teachers have striven for protected (often immersive) HL spaces. While this has encouraged positive identity practices for some students, it has been met with resistance and negative identity practices from others, particularly when language trauma is involved. Simultaneously, official language policies have by-and-large complicated this effort by dictating how much of each language should be used or providing no guidance. This presentation examines the benefits and challenges of including more flexible multilingual approaches in these complex spaces.

Assoc. Prof. Jaran Shin

Understanding minoritized children’s language learning and multilingual identity construction at the macro, meso, and micro levels

This presentation focuses on mixed-race children born into international marriage families, i.e., multicultural, in South Korea. It critically reflects on the interactions of discourses, language education policies, and multicultural children’s lived experiences at the macro, meso, and micro levels. This presentation indicates that the emergence of the multicultural population in society has a considerable impact on the (re)production of discourses about their linguistic and cultural resources. However, it also reveals notable problems at the level of policy, including confusion and inconsistency, especially concerning who and how to support multicultural children’s learning of Korean, English, and their mothers’ language(s). In addition to a disjunction between policy rhetoric and pedagogical reality, this presentation shows that the project of becoming multilingual depends on one’s personal “choice,” which leaves little space for public or community intervention. It discusses the penetration of neoliberalism at the three interrelated levels and searches for ways to address multicultural children’s learning needs and multilingual identity (re)construction.

Dr. Jae Major and Dr. Hiria McRae

Te reo Māori in teacher education: The role of language learning in culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy

Since 2019, teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand have been explicitly required to demonstrate competence in te reo Māori, the Indigenous (and an official) language, in order to gain and maintain their certification. This provided an opportunity to re-design our initial teacher education programmes to foreground learning te reo Māori to a level of competence never previously required. The focus on learning reo Māori sits alongside content about mātauranga and tikanga Māori (worldview and culture), decolonization, and white privilege. In this presentation, we critically reflect on the development, design, and implementation of reo Māori teaching and learning in initial teacher education at one institution. We interrogate the affordances and limitations of our approach and its impact on student attitudes towards culturally and linguistically sustaining teaching. We suggest that learning reo Māori as an additional language, challenges monolingual and monocultural mindsets by promoting deeper understandings about culture, language pedagogy, equity and diversity.

Prof. Christina Higgins

Building pilina in the language classroom: Learning Hawaiian in connection with Pidgin

This presentation illustrates how university-level Hawaiian language instructors use Hawaiʻi Creole (Pidgin) in their Hawaiian language classrooms to develop students’ linguistic and cultural understandings of these two languages in Hawaiʻi. Drawing on classroom observations and a conference that explored the pilina (connections) between Pidgin and Hawaiian, the presentation aims to describe how Indigenous language education can engage with the multilingual practices of learners and community members to invite metalinguistic reflection that in turn supports language learning. Instructors frequently engaged learners in reflecting on Pidgin syntax and vocabulary to scaffold their learning of the Hawaiian language, and Pidgin emerged as an important resource in building rapport in the classroom. Beyond providing valuable pedagogical support, these multilingual instructional practices honor and valorize Pidgin, a language which has historically been stigmatized in Hawaiʻi’s educational settings.