AAAL 2027: Virtual Invited Colloquium
Convened by: Angelica Galante, McGill University
Plurilingual Pedagogies as Resistance for Social and Linguistic Liberation
Convener:
Angelica Galante, McGill University
Colloquium Abstract
Amid escalating linguistic violence and imperialist language regimes that systematically marginalize non-dominant voices, education systems must actively dismantle monolingual and elitist paradigms. This colloquium positions plurilingual pedagogies as a vital mechanism for political resistance, linguistic liberation, and systemic change. Plurilingual pedagogies leverage learners’ full linguistic, cultural, and racial repertoires as key assets for critical agency (Galante, 2025). In doing so, they actively contribute to decolonizing language education (Galante et al., 2024), dismantling linguistic discrimination, and equipping diverse learners to critically examine social, political, and racial inequalities (Sultana & Dovchin, 2021).
Bringing together international perspectives from New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, the United States, and Canada, this session bridges empirical research and pedagogical practice to challenge dominant language hierarchies and deficit-based views of multilingual learners. Through six papers spanning rural and urban settings, presenters showcase teacher education frameworks, learner-centered practices, and community initiatives that operationalize plurilingual approaches across diverse contexts. Participants will engage with three critical questions:
- How can language educators employ plurilingual pedagogies to help dismantle systemic classroom inequities?
- What teacher education frameworks effectively prepare future educators to implement plurilingual pedagogies within officially monolingual or bilingual policies?
- What context-specific challenges arise when operationalizing plurilingualism, and how can they be overcome to sustain educational equity?
The colloquium will begin with an introduction, followed by the six papers. Centering marginal, Indigenous, and plurilingual perspectives, this colloquium offers pathways toward resisting linguistic discrimination and expanding the transformative possibilities of plurilingualism. The colloquium will end with an open discussion between the audience and the panelists.
Nomadic knowledging and nomadic languaging: Reimagining ELT through Mongolian nomadic tradition
Sender Dovchin, Curtin University, Australia
The recent decolonial turn has critiqued English Language Teaching (ELT) for privileging Anglocentric and native speaker norms, often relying on decontextualized and fixed Western standardized ideologies (Galante et al., 2024; Pennycook, 2007). This Western model is fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, which value collective and relational lifelong learning that is deeply connected to the land (Meighan, 2025; Venegas & Leonard, 2023). This decolonial turn, therefore, urges that we must move beyond surface-level inclusion to actively centre Indigenous voices that honour relational and reciprocal pedagogies.
This discussion is essential and overdue, but it must also be expanded. While Indigenous knowledge is rightly being centred, there is less recognition of nomadic knowledge systems, such as those practices by Mongolian nomadic traditions, which is deeply rooted in a strong connection to the land (Dovchin, 2018). Because Mongolian nomadic communities are not formally recognized as “Indigenous” by institutions such as the UN, their knowledge systems are often excluded from global conversations about decolonization and Indigenization. This is despite the fact that Mongolian nomadic culture represents one of the few surviving large-scale nomadic traditions in the world, with a history spanning thousands of years.
During my ethnographic research - ᠬᠠᠭᠤᠴᠢ ᠬᠥᠭᠡᠷᠬᠦ [Xууч Xөөрөх] - which roughly translates into English “nomadic reminiscing circle”, it was clear that the Mongolian nomadic herders were determined for their children to learn English, recognizing its importance. However, their idea of ELT was deeply rooted in a nomadic knowledge system, which I call “nomadic knowledging” and “nomadic languaging”. In this nomadic cosmology, everything is fluid – life cycle, nature, time and identity. Nothing is fixed, and permanence is an illusion. This cosmology teaches us that survival depends not on resisting change, but on adapting to it. To live well, we must move with the land, not against it. This cosmology offers a powerful lesson for ELT: learning, like life, is not linear or fixed. Just as nomads adapt to ever-changing environments, ELT educators must be responsive to diverse linguistic backgrounds and shifting identities.
Multilingualism and Indigenous language revitalization in English-language dominant higher education
Stephen May, Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland, New Zealand; Peter Keegan, Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland, New Zealand; and Mi Yung Park, Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland, New Zealand
Recent scholarship on linguistic discrimination in English language dominant higher education (HE) highlights how monoglossic English-language teaching, assessment, research, and publication processes consistently ignore and/or problematize the language repertoires of bi/multilingual students whose first language is not English (Dryden & Dovchin, 2022; Kubota et al., 2023; Wang & Dovchin, 2022). Much of the work on linguistic discrimination in HE to date, however, has been confined to the North American context (Clements & Petray, 2021; Hellerman, et al., 2024; May & Caldas, 2023; Wolfram, 2023), with only a few notable exceptions (Dovchin, 2025; Park & May, 2025).
In this presentation, we expand these discussions of linguistic discrimination in HE by drawing on empirical survey, focus group, and interview data, as well as related policy analyses, from a two-year mixed methods research project in a comprehensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand. Aotearoa New Zealand is a British settler society, where English dominates in all public and education domains, despite New Zealand’s increasingly ethnically and linguistically superdiverse population. However, New Zealand is also an exemplar of Indigenous language revitalization internationally. Te reo Māori, the Indigenous Māori language, was societally marginalized and educationally proscribed for much of New Zealand’s colonial history. However, since the 1980s, a Māori language revitalization movement has catalyzed its increasing normalization in the public domain, and its expanded use in education, including HE (May & Hill, 2018; May et al., 2026).
Given this context, we explore how, as with related work on linguistic discrimination in HE internationally, the bi/multilingual language backgrounds of the university’s linguistically superdiverse students and staff continue to be consistently overlooked in both the university’s policies and teaching and learning practices. However, we also juxtapose this with the university’s active commitment to acknowledging and accommodating the use of te reo Māori in its policies, pedagogies, and assessment practices. The recognition of Indigenous languages within HE internationally remains rare (De Korne & Leonard, 2017). As such, we highlight both the significance of this still nascent recognition of Indigenous language use, as well as how it might provide a basis for a broader incorporation of students’ bi/multilingual repertoires in English-language dominant HE teaching and learning contexts.
Plurilingual Pedagogies: Australian language education and intercultural understanding as social justice pedagogies
Ruth Fielding, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
In Australia the education system has been developed as a result of colonisation and immigration. It is a system that prioritises English-only in spite of the multilingual reality in which many citizens live. Researchers have long problematized this situation using the term “monolingual mindset” (Clyne, 2005, Gogolin, 1994; Slaughter & Hajek, 2015; Slaughter & Cross, 2021) to indicate the enduring and challenging monolingual bias within Australian educational policy and school systems. As the school population becomes increasingly plurilingual, so the need to realise the potential of the curriculum becomes increasingly urgent (ABS, 2022). In this paper, I briefly outline the context in which this research takes place outlining the policy and historical context. I then use a document analysis of educational documents (curricula) and interview extracts from pre-service teachers to unpack the potential of inclusive plurilingual pedagogies to address issues of social justice in the Australian context.
The national curriculum in Australia has eight cross-curricular General Capabilities. One of these is Intercultural Understanding which has been embedded within the learning of languages in Australia since 2003. Language learning in Australia therefore offers a space within which identity-construction, reflection, intercultural encounters and the development of self have been assumed learning within the curriculum for over twenty years (Fielding, 2021). It is within this space that there is clear potential for intercultural learning to become social justice learning within the plurilingual classroom. My prior research in this setting has shown that there is potential for identity affirming pedagogies in language education (Fielding, 2021; Fielding et al 2024). It has also shown that the potential of the curriculum may be limited by teacher professional learning - or a lack of available learning - in the realm of intercultural understanding and plurilingual pedagogies (Fielding et al, 2024; Fielding & Harbon, 2024). Drawing on curriculum statements and interviews with pre-service language teachers this paper argues that quality intercultural experiences within language education can also be seen as social justice pedagogies. It also suggests ways in which this potential can be further developed.
Translingual pedagogy for decolonisation of English language teacher education programmes in Bangladesh
Shaila Sultana, BRAC University & University of Dhaka
English language teacher educators are rarely aware of epistemological and ontological innovations introduced in applied linguistics and English language teaching research. They are not well equipped to support students who suffer from a sense of marginalisation and potential inequality in education too. The classroom realities at grassroots level indicate that the translingual movement is still a utopian idea. Hence, it is important to explore if future English language teacher educators may be enlightened about the current innovations and encouraged to engage in the reconceptualisation of English through teachers’ preservice programmes.
The presentation focuses on a qualitative research study done on 15 English language pre-service teachers (PSTs) enrolled in the MA in TESOL program at a private university in Bangladesh. The PSTs were introduced to the notions of linguistic ideologies, linguistic imperialism, multilingual ecology, and trans notions of language, specifically in relation to language education, and the correlation between English language education and social justice and equity. The data were collected from 3 sources: (1) portfolios of 15 PSTs containing weekly journals, instructional materials such as worksheets and lesson plans, and reflection reports, (2) the course teacher’s diary entries and (3) intensive one-to-one interview sessions of 5 PSTs (1 male and 4 female).
The presentation demonstrates that PSTs become agentive teachers and make informed decisions regarding the purposeful use of multiple languages to ensure students’ language learning. They start their new trajectories of ‘language-activist-scholars’. An openness to the ideas of collaboration, solidarity, respect for all languages, and the necessity of multilingual resources for classroom teaching brings significant changes to classroom teaching and resolves problems with a strong focus on practicum courses. However, the research demonstrates that any innovations are difficult to appropriate according to teaching contexts. Some PSTs may become frustrated by the realities of their teaching contexts and leave the educational institutes, which are already deprived of good teachers. Thus, the teacher education programmes cannot fulfil the target of changing the community through language teaching, provided that the institutes keep nurturing colonial legacies and linguistic ideologies handed down by the colonisers. In the end, the presentation shares some possible solutions that need further research initiatives for reimagining and humanising teacher education programmes for social justice and equity.
Towards pakikipagwikaan: Plurilingual identities and practices of Filipino immigrant language users in Montréal
John Wayne N. dela Cruz, McGill University
The dynamism of plurilingual identities and practices is central to plurilingual pedagogies (Coste et al., 1997/2009; Moore & Gajo, 2009). However, there is often a focus on fluidity (e.g., language mixing/switching), and less on fixity (e.g., language separation/naming)—which are seen as mere opposites (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010). Yet, research shows that additional language (AL) users do not always automatically engage in plurilingual practices (Dovchin & Wang, 2024). Thus, more research on “how, why, and with what outcomes laypeople... (dis)align themselves” with fixity and fluidity (Jaspers & Madsen, 2019, p. 16) is paramount to better inform how plurilingual pedagogies can leverage and foster AL users’ plurilanguaging (Piccardo, 2019), especially in officially mono/bilingual educational contexts.
As such, this paper reports on an eight-week linguistic ethnography with four adult Filipino immigrant AL users in Montréal, Canada. The study asked: (1) how and why do these AL users co-construct their plurilingual identity and language practices across communicative contexts? (2) How and why do they perceive and express their plurilingualism in fixed or fluid ways? (3) How can these AL users’ experiences and perspectives inform plurilingual pedagogies in officially mono/bilingual contexts? Data from the Plurilingual Identity Wheel and semi-structured interviews were analyzed via thematic and interpretive content analyses, while data from field notes, linguistic artifacts, and ethnographic interviews were analyzed via postcoding analysis (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014)⎯and triangulated. Findings highlight how these Filipino-Montréalers use their plurilingual repertoires to engage in pakikipagwikaan⎯agentive, creative hybrid of fixed and fluid language practices⎯to construct dynamic plurilingual identities, which they may (not) manifest outwardly. Moreover, they engage in pakikipagwikaan to resist, re-appropriate, or reproduce monolingual policies, and create interpersonal connection or distance. The study underscores how AL users’ agentive plurilingualism goes beyond a simple fluid-fixed divide, carrying implications for applying linguistic justice-oriented critical plurilingual pedagogies.
Researching plurilingualism across settings in adult community language education
Anna Mendoza, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Elif Varlik, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Eda Yildirimer, University of Arizona
Bi/multilingual people cannot avoid engaging in trans/plurilingual practices, whether in speech or simply in cognition (Ruuska, 2019). At this point, continuing to document the many practices taking place in different settings may add little to the conversation due to theoretical saturation. The field calls for more research comparing different settings visited by the same learner(s)—as has been done with other topics (Gilliland, 2016; Harklau, 2000)—as pursuing an investigation across learning contexts can lead to aligning plurilingual teaching in synergistic ways to benefit the learners.
In this study, we investigated the development of foundational literacy and oracy among pre-literate adult English beginners (13 Afghan women aged 20s through 60s). Immigrants with low levels of alphabetic print literacy tend to remain perpetual beginners in a new country’s language due to the difficulties in processing the stream of oral input—a skill that alphabetic literacy sharpens substantially (Kurvers & van de Craats, 2007; Morais & Kolinsky, 2019). We present a Venn diagram comparing learners’ plurilingual practices across two settings in our university-community partnership: 1) MA TESOL students’ phonics tutoring sessions for the women at the mosque, with extensive L1 brokering for explaining learning goals, linguistic patterns, and how to use apps for out-of-class practice, and 2) ESL classes at a church with linguistically diverse classmates, focused on listening and speaking, in which different plurilingual practices fostered an equally strong sense of community even if teachers foregrounded practicing English.
We situate these findings in low-and high-overlap plurilingual practices (Allard et al., 2023). While plurilingual practices differed across contexts in terms of degree, modality, and domain, the goal was not so much to make language policy and practice in one setting more like the other, but combine them so that each motivated learning in the other.