Language ideologies and access in a multilingual tutoring program

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study explores language ideologies within a multilingual tutoring program. We analyze the perspectives of multilingual university-students (n = 49) who were trained as tutors and paired with high school-aged multilingual learners. The program was designed to reduce educational inequalities by providing students with what we describe as language access – the opportunity to learn academic content in a student’s preferred language. This access is consistently offered to English-dominant students in U.S. schools, yet is often denied to multilingual learners. Therefore, we documented tutors’ beliefs about the purpose, successes, and challenges related to multilingual tutoring. Our results show that language ideologies played a key role in how tutoring was conceptualized and utilized, often in ways that reified monolingual orientations to education, even within a multilingually-oriented tutoring program. These results have implications for the design and implementation of multilingual tutoring, student language access, and language ideological research writ large.