UC Santa Barbara

Given the increasing number of multilingual learners enrolled in U.S. secondary schools and persistent disparities in access to quality STEM education for these students, teacher education programs must prepare secondary science teachers capable of teaching multilingual learners in equitable ways. There is a consensus in science education scholarship that as part of this preparation, preservice secondary science teachers should learn to support the literacies and languages of science so that multilingual learners can engage in meaningful disciplinary sensemaking and discourse practices. However, this scholarship has paid less attention to the ways in which preservice science teachers’ understandings of effective literacy and language support are mediated by their language ideologies. Without scrupulous attention to language ideologies, even well-intentioned efforts to support multilingual learners can reproduce linguistic hierarchies that privilege the languages and language practices of educated, white, middle-class, monolingual English speakers and further stigmatize the languages and language practices of multilingual and/or racialized students. In order to disrupt harmful language ideologies, secondary science teachers must be able to reflect critically on the opportunities they create for students to engage in the literacies and languages of science and the ways in which they support this engagement. In this qualitative study, I explored the connections across preservice secondary science teachers’ language ideologies, understandings of language support, and capacities for (critical) reflection. To do so, I analyzed interview data collected from 26 preservice secondary science teachers enrolled in a teacher education program with an explicit focus on preparing teachers to work with multilingual learners. I found that participants’ understandings of how to support the literacies and languages of science were shaped by language ideologies related to bi/multilingualism, academic language, and scientific literacies. Participants’ understandings of effective literacy and language support for multilingual learners were constrained by monoglossic language ideologies and their uncritical acceptance of “academic language” and other constructs related to simplistic, structural views of language. At the same time, participants understood oral and written discourse to be central to science learning and often reported supporting scientific literacies in ways that foregrounded students’ abilities to engage in disciplinary sense-making and communication practices rather than simply reproduce linguistic forms. It was much more common for participants to reflect on their own and their students’ challenges with scientific literacies than for participants to reflect on beliefs or practices related multilingualism or academic language, and yet few participants engaged in any critical reflection. Based on these findings, I argue that teacher education programs must be more intentional about creating both ideological spaces and implementational spaces for heteroglossic understandings of bi/multilingualism (Flores & Schissel, 2014) and adopt a sociolinguistically-informed approach to disciplinary language. At the same time, teacher education programs should meaningfully engage preservice secondary science teachers in critical reflection on their beliefs about language so that they develop the ability to surface, interrogate, and disrupt any language ideologies that might further marginalize their multilingual learners and perpetuate linguistic hierarchies.