Dr Jackie Coleman, Australian Catholic University, jacqueline.coleman@acu.edu.au
Exploring the attitudes of bilingual and multilingual undergraduate teaching students to their
linguistic resources in the context of becoming educators
Background
Australia has one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the world. 27% of its population
is overseas born (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2013) and 19 % (ABS, 2013) speak a
language other than English at home. Historically Australia has not had large concentrations of
linguistically homogenous groups as has the US, and consequently there has never been any
systemic bilingual education in its schools (Gibbons, 1997).
Australia is effectively a monolingual English-speaking country in all public domains, marked by
what Clyne (2005) describes as a “persistent monolingual mindset” (p. XI). The Australian
teaching force is overwhelmingly of English speaking background (Allard, 2006). However, the
nation’s increasing population diversity is currently mirrored in elementary and high schools
enrolments, and significantly in pre-service teacher courses. For example, in 2012, 15% of all
domestic students enrolled in Australian universities regularly spoke a language other than
English at home (Australian Government. Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change,
Science, Research and Tertiary Education, [DIICCSRTE], 2013).
Educational policy relevant to this diversity
Australian educational policies recognise as ‘authentic’ and ‘productive’ those pedagogies which
link students’ ‘outside classroom’ knowledges to inside school learning experiences. These
‘outside classroom’ knowledges include “beliefs, languages, practices and ways of knowing”
(Amosa & Ladwig, 2004, p. 1), similar to the “funds of knowledge” of minority students
articulated by Moll, Amanti, Neff and Gonzalez (1992) in the US. Nonetheless, in Australia and
internationally anecdotal evidence suggests that university faculty do not routinely draw on
pre-service teachers’ ‘linguistic funds of knowledge’ in their classes (Safford & Kelly, 2010).
Aims of study
 To explore the meanings that bilingual and multilingual pre-service teachers attach to
their linguistic ability in relation to their pre-service teacher preparation education, and
to their emerging identities as elementary teachers.
 To identify the implications of the students’ meanings for improved pedagogical
practices in this university so as to increase students’ academic outcomes.
Participants and Methodology
The study will follow a cohort of pre-service teachers during the course of their undergraduate
study. First year pre-service teachers were identified from enrolment data indicating their
bilingualism or multilingualism. An initial demographic survey instrument was used, followed
by semi-structured interviews in this first phase of the study.
Narrative Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis were used to focus on both narrative and
non-narrative units and hierarchies within the interview data which indicated student
positionalities and the discourses they invested in with regard to their ‘linguistic funds of
knowledge.’
Themes derived from analysis
Articulating ‘linguistic funds of knowledge’
Two aspects broadly described as structure or grammar, and meaning (Bialystok, 2012) were
articulated by participants. Some spoke of consciously employing explicit knowledge of
language structure or ‘grammar’ derived from their multilingualism. Others saw no relationship
between their languages (that is, no metalinguistic skills derived from multilingualism or
bilingualism). The majority indicated explicit understandings that words and combinations of
words in languages encode ‘meanings’ embedded in cultural norms.
Growing up in an English-only school system
In general, the elementary and high school teachers of the participants had positioned their
bilingualism or multilingualism as a deficit. Many students commented that their L1 proficiency
had been directly eroded by their experiences in Australian schools which promoted subtractive
bilingualism (Lambert, 1975).
Impacts of growing up in an English-only school system?
“I had to pick one [language]. If I picked Chinese, I’m still going to be bullied, going to be disliked,
with no friends. But if I picked English I can be better. But then I forgot about Chinese!” (Hu,
Mandarin, Fujianese and English speaker)
Acceptance of ‘English-only’ teacher education
School education may have prepared students to tacitly accept a teacher education program
which replicates their school experiences. They appeared not to realise and critique, but rather
to accept, the practices of an educational system which sustain the English monolingualism of
the socially powerful (including school and university faculty), often at the cost of their
students’ non-English L1 proficiency.
Students appear to accept the invisibility or marginalisation of their ‘linguistic funds of
knowledge’ at university, and its implicit corollary that English is the only valuable linguistic
capital for higher education, and accordingly, for informing their evolving elementary teacher
identities. In this sense, they are ‘receptive’ (Bourdieu, 1977) to faculty acting within the
‘language marketplace’ (Bourdieu, 1977) as mediators of linguistic correctness, that is, of
English monolingualism in higher education. Students’ comments indicated investment in wider
social discourses such as the ‘unexamined’, ‘naturalised’ discourse (Fairclough, 1995) of the
obviousness and common sense of English-only as the medium of all academic education, and as
the sole valuable linguistic constituent of their emerging identities as elementary teachers.
Accessing ‘linguistic funds of knowledge’ at university?
“I don’t think it’s an issue for me” (Mariam-Arabic & English speaker).
“Not really relevant” (Frances-Cantonese& English speaker)
Drawing the themes together
The meanings that students attach to their ‘linguistic funds of knowledge’ are reflective of the
institutional practices they reported at this university, and also of the wider social context and
discourses of which the university is a part. Being bilingual or multilingual has no part to
play in informing students’ pre-service teacher identities. This suggests that the development
of their identities as Australian elementary teachers, that is, as English-speaking teachers in an
English-medium education system, may rely on the suppression or marginalization of their
multilingual selves. Thus, institutional practices and students’ own ‘meanings’ in interaction are
resulting in less than optimal educational opportunities for these linguistically diverse preservice teachers, and incidentally for their English-monolingual pre-service teacher peers.
Implications: Towards improved pedagogy in pre-service teacher education programs
Structured opportunities to disrupt the habitus of students and faculty
Create structured opportunities for faculty and students (both multilingual and monolingual) to
interrogate the assumptions underlying the ‘monolingual reductionism’ (Skutnabb-Kangas,
2000) of institutional practices and habitus in which implicit English monolingual norms are
rarely questioned or reflected on in terms of how they may affect or limit the educational
participation and outcomes of linguistically diverse students, their identity formation (and
affirmation), and their ultimate academic achievement.
Modelling of ‘productive’ pedagogy through the creation of ‘Identity texts’
This could occur across subjects through adaptations and implementation of the pedagogy of
creating ‘Identities texts’ reported by Cummins and Early (2011). This would serve the dual
purposes of affirming the identities and ‘linguistic funds of knowledge’ of bilingual and
multilingual pre-service teachers before their university teachers and monolingual peers, and
also equally importantly, act to model ‘productive’ and ‘authentic’ pedagogies for use with their
future linguistically diverse elementary students.
Protocols for interrogating course content
Development of protocols by faculty to interrogate the content, positionalities, privilegeings
and silences in relation to linguistic diversity within pre-service teacher education subjects, and
the assigned text books for these subjects.
Teaching Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research outcomes as core content
Explicit teaching of SLA theory and research outcomes as core content of undergraduate
programs including, for example, the Common Underlying Proficiency Hypothesis (Cummins,
1981), Additive and Subtractive Bilingualism (Lambert, 1975) and studies which have
established the cognitive benefits of multilingualism (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson & Ungerleider,
2010). At present at this university, SLA outcomes are included in undergraduate elective,
rather than core, subjects, and in post-graduate qualifications. Teaching of SLA research
outcomes would powerfully and publically articulate “a ‘counter-discourse’ to the implicit
devaluation of [diverse] students’ abilities, languages [and] cultures” (Cummins & Early, 2011,
p. 4) within the university space.
Administrative Steps
Within this overall process of change in pedagogical and institutional practices, the university
could take administrative steps to position student multilingualism more visibly, for example,
passing on data about students’ ‘linguistic funds of knowledge’ to teaching staff as a matter of
course at the start of each semester. The university may also act on the advice of Nieto (2000) in
the US who contends that universities should “rethink admissions requirements” and “[give]
priority to candidates who are fluent in at least one language other than English” (p. 183). Such
a measure taken by a socially prestigious institution like a university could potentially have a
very powerful effect on socially pervasive discourses which frame non-English L1s as deficits in
contemporary Australia.
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