Chapter 8: Fostering A Multilingual Mindset: The University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute

The word language appears in just one place in the American Council on Education (ACE) Comprehensive Framework for Internationalization—the study of foreign languages is included as a core component of the undergraduate curriculum, along with areas such as regional and global studies. Although not stated explicitly, the term foreign languages in this framework (and in popular U.S. discourse more broadly) refers to languages other than English. This framing of languages other than English as “foreign” and the absence of any mention of languages in areas other than curriculum in the ACE framework reveals an implicit monolingual English bias that is based on two faulty assumptions. The first assumption is that domestic undergraduate student body of U.S. institutions of higher education (IHEs) is comprised solely of monolingual English speakers. The second assumption is that languages other than English are not relevant for other aspects of institutional internationalization. For U.S. IHEs to meet the goal of the ACE framework to promote “internationalization that is anti-colonial, anti-racist, and globally and locally inclusive,” they must move from a “monolingual mindset” (Clyne, 2008) to both provide opportunities for additional language learning for all students and recognize and further promote the existing linguistic diversity within IHEs and in all aspects of institutional internationalization. This chapter offers two case studies from the UW Language Institute. The first focuses on the Wisconsin Language Roadmap, a federally funded, crosssector initiative that developed a set of policy recommendations for the educational sector to meet the state’s future multilingual workforce and community needs. The second describes a campus-wide project to increase awareness of existing linguistic diversity in the university. Through these efforts, the Language Institute aims to contribute to anti-colonial, anti-racist, and inclusive approaches to comprehensive institutional internationalization at UW-Madison.