Supporting Multilingual Undergraduate and Graduate Students by Bridging Disciplinary Study and Critical Applied Linguistics

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Investigating and Sustaining Postsecondary World Language Education Enrollment and Learning Outcomes: Challenges, Initiatives, and Opportunities (Table 9)

Abstract

Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC) is an emerging program model in higher education that expands learners’ access to and development in world languages through co-requisite language sections attached to “parent” courses across the disciplines (see Plough & Tamboura, 2022). LAC parallels the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement originating in the 1980s. While WAC recognizes writing as the primary tool for disciplinary learning, LAC sees language as the primary tool (Straight, 1998). The LAC model works beyond the confines of traditional language classrooms and promotes the development and use of disciplinary registers in the target language (TL). Rather than emphasizing the mechanics or rules of the TL, LAC instructors (graduate students in the disciplines and fluent in the TL) work with parent faculty to determine the specific terminologies, registers, and genres needed to function in their associated disciplines. LAC courses seek to provide students (already conversant in the TL) and graduate instructors with authentic opportunities for language use in their disciplines. In this way, LAC offers unique promise as a program model, as it promotes cross-disciplinary curricular innovations, bringing distinct departments and colleges together in pioneering ways and supporting efforts in language program vitality in higher education. Furthermore, LAC is intentional in bringing learners from mixed demographics and backgrounds together (Krebs, 2018); this intentionality disrupts segregationist language learning models which have been shown to “magnify” monoglossia (Salaberry, 2020, p. 266) and creates a productive third space for learning (Bhabha, 1994). While rising in popularity since the 1990s, LAC outcomes remain under-assessed in higher education.
This study reports on a LAC program in the Northeastern US and examines ways that its participants critically reflected on language in relation to the model. To explore participants’ sensemaking surrounding their LAC experiences, the study employed qualitative and ethnographic traditions. Such methods focus on understanding participants’ behaviors and values in a discrete location; they move from detailed description of events and phenomena to identifying concepts and themes that are grounded in the data collected, illuminating localized ways of understanding (Pole & Morrison, 2003). Analysis draws on interviews with 10 graduate instructors and 16 students of Korean, Mandarin, and Spanish, as well as ethnographic classroom observations in five different classrooms during 2022–2023. Findings reveal ways that taking part in LAC advanced students’ and instructors’ authentic participation in professional language communities, while also critically nuancing their awareness about the (in)adequacies of available institutional spaces and resources to support marginalized linguistic identities in higher education. The LAC model demonstrates promise in addressing issues commonly faced in language programs and classrooms—including declining enrollments, decontextualized language use, and limited opportunities to discuss more complex topics in the TL. Emphasizing the important role of applied linguists within LAC initiatives, the study also identified challenges emerging in supporting LAC instructors who are disciplinary experts but not language specialists and strategies to address them.

Author

• Angelika Kraemer, Cornell University