Language Ideologies and Policies: Multilingualism and Education

Abstract Educating multilingual students is a great challenge for both teachers and parents in a society in which English is the medium of schooling and of wider communication. Top‐down language policies often overpower teachers’ individual intentions and practices. In this paper, we point out that language ideologies in ‘commonsense’ beliefs and political orientations, rather than pedagogical considerations or research evidence, motivate language policies. We particularly discuss the language ideologies of standardization and monolingualism that underlie bilingual education and English‐only policies in the U.S. and how these policies conflict with the reality of multilingual students’ linguistic and identity practices. We also examine research on bilingual, bidialectal, and plurilingual practices in which multiple languages or varieties within a language co‐exist and are used creatively by speakers for significant social and pragmatic functions, and we highlight the critical gap between top‐down language policies and such ground‐level plurilingualism. Teachers’ knowledge of such plurilingual practices by their students and their deeper understanding of and critical perspective toward language policies can empower them to negotiate top‐down language polices in their classrooms in order to facilitate language and literacy development among their multilingual students.