Challenging the Monolingual Mindset: Advocacy for Multilingual Learners

The latest episode of The Teacher Think-Aloud Podcast explores the pervasive issue of monolingual bias in education with Dr. Lillian Ardell, founder of Language Matters. Hosts Anna and Shé join Dr. Ardell in examining how the belief that one language—often English—should dominate schooling continues to shape policies, classroom practices, and student identities.

Dr. Ardell unpacks how monolingual bias shows up across educational contexts, even in spaces that claim to support multilingualism, and explains the long-term harm these assumptions cause for multilingual learners. She introduces her framework for recognizing and addressing linguistic inequities, along with insights from her book, Disrupting the Monolingual Bias, which outlines advocacy archetypes educators can embody to challenge English-only norms.

“ The monolingual bias is a set of deficit beliefs and attitudes about language and about the learners themselves that promote a story of urgent academic English proficiency that must come at all costs. It comes at costs to their heritage language. It come at costs to access to their culture. I argue that it comes at costs to their full identity development.”
 — Dr. Lillian Ardell

Through powerful metaphors, lived experiences, and reflective dialogue, the episode emphasizes advocacy as a sustained practice—one rooted in community, self-care, and the belief that honoring students’ full linguistic repertoires is essential to equitable language education.

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