Implications of Multilingual Students' Stories for Promoting Linguistic Justice in Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter explores multilingual students' experiences and addresses ways that institutions of higher learning can best celebrate and support multilingual learners. Challenging the long-standing deficit model, many researchers have used raciolinguistic and translingual concepts to reframe multilingualism as an asset. The author draws on these frameworks in contextualizing her oral history research collecting multilingual students' stories. This year-long study conducted in 2022-23 was funded by an internal grant at a private U.S. university in the Rocky Mountain region. Eleven multilingual students with diverse native languages and countries of origin were interviewed about their perceptions of their native languages as heritage languages, their academic experiences, and other aspects of their lived experiences. After documenting and analyzing these stories, the author offers suggestions for what institutions of higher learning can do to best institute linguistic justice on their increasingly multilingual campuses.