Dear Teachers, Your Multilingual Learners Aren't Behind
The phrase I hear everywhere: “My MLs are soooooo far behind.”
I hear this phrase all the time, usually in a PLC and a veces during a coaching session. And it’s nearly always from someone who cares deeply about their students. It’s rarely said with judgment. More often, it’s said with exhaustion, concern, and a genuine desire to do right by kids. You've put in countless hours staying after school, held extra tutoring sessions, and advocated fiercely for your students. Yet somehow, your MLs are still "behind."
But behind what, exactly? Behind their monolingual peers? Behind state-mandated testing benchmarks? …Or behind expectations that were never designed using multilingual learners’ developmental trajectories in mind? "Behind" is not a neutral description, even though it may sound as such. It’s often a reflection of monolingual expectations being applied to multilingual learners. The problem isn’t necessarily the learner's development, but the lens through which we interpret it.
Which begs the question: If our education systems were built around monolingual readers and writers, how can we accurately assess multilingual development?
Challenging Monolingualism as the Norm
Now that I’ve hooked ya, let’s dig into the research. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, English Learners make up 10.6% of the K-12 student population in the United States. If one in every 10 students is on a different language journey than their peers, shouldn’t that prompt us to reconsider what we define as “normal” language development?
Because the Monolingual Bias is systemic and insidious, it masquerades as an objective set of learning standards. It is not that MLs are "behind"; it is that we have normalized monolingualism as the benchmark against which multilingual learners are measured.
The system demands that MLs perform feats that would overwhelm most—mastering content, transferring knowledge across languages, and navigating hostile cultural barriers—often while their very existence in US contexts of learning is challenged by an increasingly hostile sociopolitical climate. To call these students “behind” is not just an educational error; it is an equity issue that ignores the extraordinary cognitive, linguistic, and social work multilingual learners do every single day.
Different is not Deficient
A common misconception about MLs is that their language development should look the same as that of monolingual English-speaking students. When they don’t meet the same classroom expectations, it’s easy to assume they are “behind” academically. But this view misses how multilingual learners actually grow and learn.
The typical English-language assessment can’t fully test our ML’s abilities. A student might still be building vocabulary or reading skills in English, while at the same time showing strong growth in areas like critical thinking, problem solving, or translingual understanding. If our only window into student learning is English, we’re looking through a very narrow frame.
Dr. Kathy Escamilla and Dr. Susan Hopewell have long challenged this assumption that multilingual students should be evaluated against their monolingual peers. More recently, scholars like Dr. Doris Linville-Chávez have continued to expand our understanding of multilingual trajectories, demonstrating that multilingual learners often develop literacy in ways that simply don’t mirror monolingual pathways. Different development is not delayed development, or to use William Labov’s phrase, “Difference is not deficient” (1972).
Their work reminds us that multilingual learners draw from an integrated linguistic repertoire, not two completely separate language systems. So if we only assess students in English, we’re missing a large part of what they actually know and can do. I’ve written more about this idea in my post, The Paradox of Biliteracy and Assessments, where I explore why our assessment systems often confuse English proficiency with learning.
To understand more about comprehension bias, check out this video:
The Assessment Trap: Are We Measuring Learning or English Dominance?
Let’s be honest. No assessment captures everything a learner knows. But many of the assessments we rely on were never designed to measure bilingual development. As a result, they often fail to capture strengths such as:
Home language literacy
Cross-linguistic transfer
Translanguaging as a meaning-making practice
Conceptual understanding expressed across languages
So let’s ask ourselves a different question: Are we measuring learning… or are we measuring a students’ proximity to monolingualism and their assimilation practices?
That question becomes a little uncomfortable because when English becomes the only language that “counts,” we risk confusing language proficiency with intelligence, potential, and academic ability.
They’re Listening… and Forming Opinions About their Worth
The consequences of describing multilingual learners as "behind" reach far beyond academics. It’s not just a phrase assessing their language proficiency. It also carries a powerful message about identity, belonging, and self worth.
A student who repeatedly receives the message that they are “behind” or somehow lacking in development compared to their peers may begin to internalize assumptions that were never intended. They may view their first language as a problem rather than an asset. Or believe that their bilingualism is holding them back instead of strengthening them. They may begin to wonder if their intelligence only “counts” when it can be demonstrated in English.
This point became clear during my research for Disrupting the Monolingual Bias. In my conversations with translanguaging scholar and all around bad-ass, Dr. Susana Ibarra Johnson, she shared stories from her youth as a Mestiza-American student where she was publicly shamed for speaking “Tex-Mex” Spanglish. Moments where her trans-national (from Spain) professor would call her slurs for mixing the languages, wondering aloud if she was a good fit for enrolling in an institution of higher learning.
What strikes me most about Susana’s story isn’t simply her resilience. It’s that long before she encountered that professor, people in her life had already affirmed her bilingual identity. As Susana told me:
“He shamed me, but I didn’t feel ashamed of the way I spoke. I was kind of like, Wait, hold on, I know who I am. I’m very grounded in my community.”
While a grounding mindset mattered to Susana, I worry about the psychological welfare for our nation’s multilingual learners who don’t yet have that foundation. What happens when the adults around them – despite the very best intentions – continually describe them as “behind,” “low,” or “not enough”? The words we use become the realities students begin to believe. And that’s why this topic matters.
A Closing Reflection
The next time you hear someone say: “My multilingual learners are so far behind,” I hope you’ll pause before agreeing and instead ask:
Behind compared to what? Behind whose expectations?
And were those expectations ever designed for multilingual learners in the first place?
When we begin asking different questions, we begin seeing different possibilities. Because multilingual learners are not simply learning another language. They are navigating one of the most cognitively sophisticated experiences we ask of children.
If you’re ready to uncover more of the hidden assumptions shaping instruction, assessment, and leadership, I invite you to book my featured talk all about Disrupting the Monolinugal Bias.
Together, we’ll explore how to disrupt the monolingual forces in our districts, replacing them with more compassionate, evidence-based practices. After all, meaningful change isn't about “fixing” our multilingual learners. It requires recalibrating our own perspectives—learning to see our MLs not for what they are lacking, but for the abundantly capable individuals they truly are.
