“Awareness is just the first step”: Preservice teachers’ changing views of teaching multilingual learners in an ESOL course

There is an urgent need to prepare highly effective teachers to meet the challenges posed by an increasing number of multilingual students from different backgrounds in U.S. public schools. Traditional teacher preparation programs tend to offer English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses to meet the state’s ESOL endorsement requirements; however, these courses tend to focus on language acquisition theories and methods, failing to equip future teachers with the knowledge and skills to implement pedagogical approaches that leverage on students’ prior knowledge and backgrounds, which would contribute to their academic success and language proficiency development. In this study, researchers employed a longitudinal case study design to explore how preservice teachers perceive their preparation to promote a humanizing pedagogy beyond ESOL training. The case was an upper-level undergraduate ESOL course at a university in Southwest Florida. Multiple sources of data (e.g., course assignments and discussions) were collected from 27 volunteer participants enrolled in the course in the fall of 2023 and analyzed using analytic coding. The findings indicated that participants had a limited willingness to reflect on their prior assumptions about teaching multilingual learners and to understand the educational, cultural, and social needs of these students. The study’s findings emphasize the crucial need for focused, intentional training in self-awareness and humanizing pedagogies in teacher preparation programs to equip future teachers with the skills and knowledge to support the academic success of multilingual students.