Unveiling the Strengths and Challenges: Working as the Only Asian Multilingual Teacher in a U.S. High School

While student populations in U.S. classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse, teacher diversity continues to lag behind. Within this context, immigrant multilingual teachers’ non-native speaker status is often highlighted, whereas their broader pedagogical and cultural expertise remains underrecognized. In response, this study examines the teaching practices and experiences of Mr. Tran, the only Asian immigrant multilingual teacher who teaches and supports multilingual students in Algebra at a southeastern U.S. high school. Drawing on interactional sociolinguistics, linguistically responsive teaching, and multimodality, data collected over one and a half years reveal how Mr. Tran’s multilingual and multicultural knowledge and experiences expanded his students’ communicative repertoires in linguistically responsive ways and transformed both his role as a mathematics teacher and his classroom into a space where linguistic diversity was celebrated. At the same time, the findings show that Mr. Tran experienced marginalization and exclusion beyond the classroom, underscoring the need for attention to the experiences of immigrant multilingual teachers and for further research in this area.