It’s not just kids that don’t speak English: leaning toward teacher preparation for multilingual learners Open Access

Since Lau v. Nichols (1974), scholars and educators have grappled with how to best prepare teachers who educate multilingual learners (MLLs) in the nation’s public schools. Florida, where this work is centered, has the third largest concentration of students identified as English learners (ELs), about 10% of the K-12 student body, and the state mandates its approved teacher preparation programs provide 300 h of specialized content, which includes knowledge of instructional strategies appropriate for multilingual students (Florida Department of Education, 1990). This article provides a comprehensive description of one teacher preparation program’s effort to provide quality experiential professional development through field experiences for educators at the pre-service level, referred to hereafter as teacher candidates (TCs). I will first report on the conclusion of Project BEN (see Ankeny & Oslick, 2021), a one-year pilot initiative to refine and broaden clinical experiences for the required English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) endorsement before expanding on the implementation of the first phase of a multi-tiered partnership program. The article also presents preliminary findings of TCs’ perceived development and concludes by reflecting on barriers and benefits of the program.

This paper refers to the subgroup of students within the teach preparation program as MLLs. Though much has been said regarding terminology for students whose first or home language is not English, I contend that MLL provides a positive rephrasing that better represents the intent behind this project and highlights the value of the group’s linguistic richness. However, note that the terms EL and English language learner (ELL) are used interchangeably and appear in this paper because these terms are in current use by both federal and state policies.

Project BEN was the initial effort toward programmatic shifts. In a one-year pilot program, Ankeny & Oslick (2021) sought to build a network of classroom teachers, ESOL teachers and community advocates who could mentor teacher candidates in existing clinical experiences prior to student teaching. Over an academic year, we trained six classroom teachers and two ESOL teachers at two schools to work together with TCs and become familiarized with culturally and linguistically responsive strategies. After training sessions, the matched pairs worked on coursework in tandem with weekly visits to the school sites for nine consecutive Mondays. Candidates participated in instructional tasks under the supervision of a classroom teacher and shadowed the ESOL teacher during the assigned instructional time for language support.

Through this work, I established an ESOL Advisory Board composed of teachers and leaders from across the school district that met quarterly to discuss the needs and challenges of MLLs post-COVID-19 pandemic and to discuss potential solutions. Over time, the Board became a source of mentorship for TCs in future academic terms.

Candidates completed exit interviews, satisfaction surveys and a reflective essay. Findings revealed TC perceptions and challenges, namely that they had not witnessed classroom teachers implement ESOL strategies in everyday classes and had limited interactions with the ESOL teacher. Also noted were perceived tensions between the classroom and ESOL teachers as they negotiated for language instruction time. Reflective essays had common themes. Mostly TCs showed great enthusiasm for the experience and reported perceived personal and professional growth, but there was still no evidence of mastery of the ESOL Standards (2010) or preparation to implement language strategies, as the state statute requires. In their own exit interviews, the two ESOL mentors voiced the need for additional time for TCs to deepen their understanding of how a second language develops, its relation to students’ sociocultural wellbeing, and time to become skilled in implementing ESOL strategies. In other words, one semester of culturally and linguistically responsive training was not enough. In meeting discussions, the ESOL Advisory Board echoed these documented sentiments.

Teaching MLLs in inclusive classrooms has become conflated with “just good teaching” in Florida (de Jong & Harper, 2013), despite a wealth of research supporting the notion that specialized skills are integral to working with MLLs in elementary schools (Barros, Domke, Symons, & Ponzio, 2021; Coady, Harper, & De Jong, 2016; Lucas & Villegas, 2008; Turkan, De Oliveira, Lee, & Phelps, 2014). This is a direct result of the state’s language policy, the Florida Department of Education (1990), which stipulates that all elementary education educators must receive preparation to work with MLLs through a series of courses that culminate in an ESOL endorsement. Frozen in time since its conception, the Decree has faced continuous criticism from scholars who have found little evidence of a relationship between ESOL-endorsed classroom teachers and increased academic benefits for MLLs (Coady et al., 2016; De Jong, 2004; Dwyer & O’Gorman-Fazzolari, 2023; Harper & de Jong, 2009; Platt, Harper, & Mendoza, 2003). Yet, the Decree’s mandate remains unchanged, leaving teacher educators to contend with mandated preparation through coursework that may not have a direct, positive impact on student achievement.

Several factors further complicate matters. Florida has a high number of students labeled ELL, yet their representation is far from equal across school districts, with some rural districts reporting none and urban areas as many as 68,000, as is the case with Miami-Dade, the second largest school district in the nation (FLDOE ACCESS 2.0 reports, 2023). The partner school district described in this article has about 62,700 total students, of which 3,135, or about 5%, are MLLs (identified as EL) within the ESOL program (Know Your Schools, 2024). With such few MLLs spread across such a large school district, one of the initial challenges to partnering with classroom teachers was finding classrooms with a large enough density of MLLs who could participate in the program. Another barrier was the lack of linguistic resources in the community, since schools that do not meet a certain number of MLLs cannot allocate funding for a language specialist, known in Florida as an ESOL teacher.

The number of students and the time they receive ESOL services presents another discrepancy across districts. In compliance with federal law, students’ English language proficiency is tested yearly with the ACCESS 2.0 (WIDA Consortium). In 2023, the state reported 14% of its EL population was successfully exited from the program after reaching sufficient English proficiency. Our partner district performed slightly better, with 16% reaching English proficiency. The question of time to proficiency has been explored, with the latest estimates suggesting five years are needed to reach language proficiency (Zhang & Winke, 2024). Florida does not report its EL’s average length of stay in the ESOL program, but it has recently begun keeping track of students in the program longer than five years (M. Santiago, personal communication), a group known in the literature as long-term English learners or LTEL (Menken, Kleyn, & Chae, 2012).

Another complicating factor for many teacher preparation programs is candidate demographics and candidate linguistic repertoire. TC demographics in our teacher preparation program align with national trends, mostly “female, White and monolingual” (Zumwalt & Craig, 2008, p. 404). These TCs displayed a lack of confidence in working with MLLs due to limited language skills, which was noted in previous exit reports and which echoes the existing literature (Hansen-Thomas, Grosso Richins, Kakkar, & Okeyo, 2016; Kolano, Dávila, Lachance, & Coffey, 2014; Li, Hinojosa, & Wexler, 2017). The racial gap between many TCs and ELLs combined with the typical TC’s lack of language capacity is further exacerbated by state educational practices, which reinforce these gaps and provide limited resources to bridge them. Certainly, MLLs’ linguistic abilities are often racialized (Flores & Rosa, 2015) and seen from a deficit standpoint across contexts (Flores & García, 2020; Shapiro, 2014; Valdes, 2010). The state’s existing assimilative cultural practices (Dwyer & O’Gorman-Fazzolari, 2023) prioritize acquisition of the English language at all costs. Dual language programming and other bilingual programs are scarcely offered in the district and do not present potential educational opportunities to TCs as the state licensure requires an ESOL endorsement. Essentially, the mandates of our local policy prescribe that TCs implement strategies in an English immersion environment.

Drawing from the existing knowledge base and the contextual factors discussed above, I set out to design clinical experiences characterized by active student participation, exposure to linguistically and culturally responsive practices in authentic environments, and most importantly, exposure over a consecutive, extended period. Scholarship supports field experiences as part of teacher preparation for MLLs (Bollin, 2007; Heineke & Davin, 2014; Solano-Campos, Hopkins, & Quaynor, 2020), but a unified method does not exist, and the diverse nature of the state makes it nearly impossible to prescribe one. Additionally, though field experiences in a teacher preparation program can hardly be categorized as service learning, there are compelling parallels. Both entail an outside individual entering a community space for a particular purpose. Here Mitchell’s (2008) poignant distinction between traditional and critical service-learning applies as it highlights the intention toward service. Mitchell (2008) further contends that involving all stakeholders is necessary for “critical service-learning experiences that effectively respond to community needs by utilizing the experience, expertise, and resources of the community” (p. 61). This notion influenced the field experience design, including considering the community needs identified through Project BEN, described above.

The Florida Department of Education allows state colleges and universities to make programmatic determinations regarding how the ESOL standards (2010) are met. This flexibility encouraged our ESOL Advisory Board to consider ways that clinical experiences could be more effectively designed to accomplish program goals. With this input, I settled on a three-phase approach, with field experiences occurring alongside coursework occurring over three academic terms. Figure 1 below illustrates the multi-tiered sequence. Note that each phase is associated with a domain that corresponds with a category of the mandated ESOL Standards (2010). These include Domain 1, Cross-cultural Communication, Domain 2, Applied Linguistics, Domain 3, Methods of Teaching, Domain 4, ESOL Curriculum and Materials Development and Domain 5, ESOL Testing & Evaluation.

Phase 1 remained similar to Project BEN’s approach, albeit with a key change. Project BEN had no specific ESOL mentorship component, but in Phase 1 ESOL teachers mentored an assigned TC over a 10-h experience. This change alleviated the pressure of locating one classroom with multiple MLLs because the ESOL mentor could target various grade levels at a single school and expose TCs to the inner workings of the inclusive instructional model. The 10-h experience is structured in a checklist provided to students (see  Appendix). The anchor course in Phase 1, Language and Culture of Bilinguals, is the TC’s first encounter with topics related to the state’s language policies, the second language acquisition process, concepts of culture, and linguistically responsive teaching. I decided to incorporate a recurring reflection on an essential question at various points during the course, what is the role of the classroom teacher in educating MLLs? And invited TCs during class meetings to revise and edit their responses as they completed the field experience. Similar inquiry patterns are embedded in future courses. The culminating activity in Phase 1 reports on the 10-h checklist and requires TCs to compose a reflective essay.

As the sequence progresses, field experiences will become layered, expanding on candidates’ knowledge of MLL’s backgrounds, linguistic capacity and cultural differences. As established in Phase 1, class meetings will embed an inquiry pattern aimed at developing reflective practices. In Phase 2, TCs will enroll in two infused courses, Language Arts Methods and Literature for Children, where they will read the young adult novel, Efren, divided (Cisneros, 2020), and reflect on the challenges faced by MLLs in poverty and those living undocumented. Extension activities include inviting The Farmworker’s Association of Florida as guest speakers and field visits to local community farms. Further, TCs will complete a series of learning and evaluative tasks with a classroom teacher guiding the TCs to plan and deliver a 40-min English Language Arts lesson in inclusive classrooms. In this task, they consider their cultural and academic knowledge of the MLLs present to select and attempt implementation of ESOL strategies. Concurrently, the second course, Mathematics in Elementary School, challenges TCs to complete three evaluative and instructional tasks with selected MLLs.

Finally, in Phase 3, TCs will immerse themselves in an elementary classroom with two or more MLLs to plan and implement a variety of ESOL strategies in the capstone course, Curriculum & Assessment of Bilinguals. TCs are then matched with classroom and ESOL cooperating teachers that evaluate them during the teaching of content lessons. Supervising faculty will provide evaluation and feedback and assist TCs in building a capstone portfolio.

The sequence is currently being implemented incrementally. Phase 1 has been carried out the longest, over four consecutive academic terms. As such, here I report preliminary findings only from Phase 1. As part of the culminating activity, TCs submitted a detailed report on the activities completed with the guidance of the 10-h checklist and composed a reflective essay. The report includes items they collected during the field experience, such as daily schedules, classroom observation notes and academic progress data points from monitoring assessments like ACCESS 2.0 results and the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST). TCs also conducted interviews with the ESOL mentors and composed short reflections after assisting MLLs on short instructional tasks, like trade book read alouds.

I collected individual reports and reflective essays from four consecutive terms (n = 30). The purpose of this practitioner inquiry was to determine what the culminating task after Phase 1 revealed about TC’s initial learning experiences. Candidate demographics included 28 females and two males; 29 were monolingual, English speakers and one was a bilingual English–Spanish speaker. About 25 TCs identified their race as White, two as Hispanic and three as Black. After data collection, I created and kept records in a codebook (Creswell, 2014) using Microsoft Excel. The research questions guiding the inquiry included, (1) What do teacher candidates’ reflections reveal about their experience completing the field experience for ESOL endorsement? And (2) What conclusions do TCs demonstrate about their role as future teachers of MLLs? I began analysis by employing qualitative coding, first using open codes to record initial observations and examine similarities and differences. Here I mostly labeled wording that TCs used. Next, I grouped similar sentiments into axial codes, constructing codes from themes through an iterative process, later categorizing these into groups and re-generating terms as needed. Finally, three distinct patterns emerged from these categories.

TCs conveyed strong emotional responses as they reflected on the instructional context and on the evolution of their perceptions. Some students were forward in acknowledging their own stereotypes and trepidation to participate in the experience. The following excerpts illustrate these insights:

For many, the sadness and inadequacy they noted when MLLs struggled was mediated by a “sense of pride,” “enlightenment” and “inspiration” as they interacted in learning tasks with MLLs and developed a deeper understanding of the teacher’s role. This theme was most notable in TC’s reflections about newcomers, the term used in our school district for MLLs at the beginning levels of English proficiency. One student described her interaction with a newcomer as such:

The emotional nature noted in these findings reveals a gap in current literature as the most explicit discussions tend to revolve around feelings of inadequacy and underpreparedness (Hansen-Thomas et al., 2016; Kolano et al., 2014; Li et al., 2017).

TCs reflected on their understanding of the ELL experience, their interpretations of the ESOL and classroom teacher relationship and noted attitudes shifts toward MLLs and their teachers. The most recurring theme throughout the analysis was the limited instructional time that TCs observed while shadowing the mentors. The local school district has determined that the ESOL teacher can support students by either pushing into the classroom and taking the group to a small table away from the rest of the group or by pulling out the student from the classroom to a nearby room for a short time. Each school’s administrative team decides when and for how long the ESOL teacher schedules language support. Timing and the tension this caused between the classroom teachers and the ESOL teachers at times was another recurring theme. Some students put it as such:

Collaboration challenges have been documented in the past, and initial findings suggest future analysis will continue to support these claims (Bell & Baecher, 2012; McClure & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010; Whiting, 2017). This local practice can also be interpreted as an indication of documented hierarchical power dynamics between minority ESOL teachers and White classroom teachers, with the latter’s possible dominant language ideologies at play. The interesting factor regarding this pattern is that the field experience exposed TCs to this reality.

TCs had common experiences through this strategically designed field experience, and their reflections expressed both awareness of documented challenges MLLs face in school and certainty that a variety of specialized skills are needed to work with MLLs as classroom teachers, a finding that supports existing literature (Barros et al., 2021; Coady et al., 2016; Lucas & Villegas, 2008; Turkan et al., 2014). Some TCs demonstrated further awareness of instructional methods such as ESOL strategies. Some examples include cognate identification, questions or prompting students by varying language and linguistic resources such as translation and language learning phone applications.

For others, the experience provided confidence and excitement for the next phases. “Tina,” a female, white, monolingual student, remarked that the experience “allowed me to observe strategies in real time and I feel like I can try them next semester because I’ve seen them.” Likewise, others reported feeling “more ready” and “confident to learn more strategies” after the initial experience. Kevin, a Black male student in his sophomore year, summarized it as:

Many TCs noted a shift in personal beliefs about the value of cultural awareness to teach children, a secondary finding supported by others (Bollin, 2007; Heineke & Davin, 2014), and the importance of understanding the second language process. These ideas are supported by the following sentiment:

Most notably, the findings reveal that TCs enter the profession with differing levels of cultural and linguistic competence and, as such, progress at various rates. It was expected that beliefs, attitudes and perspectives of MLLs would shift and even that TCs would note power tensions between classroom and ESOL teachers. However, the findings suggest that some TCs captured more nuanced, deeper challenges that were not explicitly discussed through course content. The excerpts below articulate those who identified factors such as limited funding for language services, noted the limitations of English-only programs and questioned the equitability of these practices:

As teacher education programs remain bound to local policies and practices, I believe this is a progressive starting point to the new program’s sequence and invite other practitioners to evaluate the potential experiential opportunities in their local communities. Given the political winds of state legislatures, it is incumbent upon teacher educators to continue to seek ways that advance equitable education of MLLs. The preliminary data above presents evidence of the field experience’s value toward candidate preparation to work with MLLs. Field experience in an authentic context coupled with coursework has shown that, when afforded the opportunity, teacher candidates can capture nuanced challenges in the context of learning for MLLs. These findings particularly point to the socioemotional layers of preparing TCs to work in this environment.

I am confident that the coming programmatic changes across the ESOL sequence will provide opportunities for further inquiry, such as case studies that investigate the long-term application of strategies for MLLs. I look forward to collecting and analyzing further measures as TCs progress throughout the field experiences. The findings presented point to a need for considering the level of knowledge, the contextual realities and the socioemotional factors that impact TCs as they undergo multi-tiered preparation and a need for monitoring the experience over time.