Why English Learners and Multilingual Learners are Not the Same
When I was 9 years old, my family immigrated to the United States from France. On my first day of 4th grade, I found myself in a suburban American school, not knowing a single word of English. That experience is not uncommon in this country, where at least 1 out of 10 students in public schools are English Learners (or EL/ELL).
As this population continues to grow, educators are advocating for the elimination of the EL label altogether. It’s part of a wider trend to replace deficit-based terminology with asset-based alternatives in education. Major organizations like WIDA (who administers the most widely used English proficiency assessments in the US), TESOL, and the DOE’s Office of English Language Acquisition have shifted to or have announced a shift toward the term “multilingual,” or ML and MLL, to describe “all students who come in contact with and/or interact in languages in addition to English on a regular basis.” Three states now exclusively use the term ML or MLL in place of EL, and the current mood will likely push more to follow suit.
While this movement is well-intentioned, its advocates are confusing two distinct groups: students who speak two or more languages fluently, whom we can call multilingual or ML, and students who do not yet speak English fluently, or EL Learners. For a non-native English speaker entering an American school, particularly in later grades like I did when I immigrated to the US, language proficiency is undoubtedly an obstacle to learning. In fact, the divergent realities between these groups make clear that eliminating the label of EL in favor of a single term like ML is a mistake.
Last year, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, decrying American schools’ treatment of English Learners as “students with deficits,” called “bilingualism and biculturalism” a “superpower.” That assertion isn’t exactly false, as bilingualism has been shown to impart specific cognitive benefits. But Cardona, and those seeking to remove the term “EL,” are ignoring the profound difference between a multilingual student whose proficiency in additional languages only benefits their learning, and a student who struggles to comprehend academic material because they are not fluent in English.
In fact, the significant academic achievement gap between native English speakers and English Learners has remained consistent both within states and in nationwide tests like NAEP. In California, academic performance among English Learners has fallen to its lowest levels in a decade. Bringing the term EL under the umbrella of ML is not useful to teachers who seek to hone in on the specific academic needs of their English Learners.
My own experience offers a useful example of this difference. Growing up in suburban New Hampshire, I had no choice but to learn and communicate in English in a school where no one spoke my native language, French. Whether school staff referred to me as EL or ML made little difference—rather, it was the total immersion in English that allowed me to quickly catch up to my peers.
Recently, I worked as an Assistant Principal at a charter school in Nashville, TN whose student population was overwhelmingly made up of first and second-generation immigrants. One student at this school, “Miguel,” started the 4th grade after immigrating with his family from Central America. By the time I started the 5th grade, I had effectively become fluent in English despite exclusively speaking French at home. After over a year at our school, however, Miguel was still unable to express himself in English.
That’s not because I was better at language acquisition than Miguel. Rather, because he was surrounded by other Spanish speakers at school, Miguel only spoke in Spanish, and, other than the sporadic English instruction he received as part of our school’s MLL program, was never encouraged or incentivized to communicate in English by his teachers. In our current climate and its disdain for “deficit-based” language, it would have been seen as insensitive to incentivize students to only use English in class. In attempting to avoid the EL label, however, Miguel’s teachers have made it more likely he will remain perennially behind his peers in school.
There is an effective case to be made that immigrant children throughout the country are not receiving adequate levels of support. To solve this issue, however, we should advocate for specific policy levers like increased training for general classroom teachers or staffing of multilingual education specialists. Eliminating the term EL label will only work against these efforts, as recognizing this specific group of students is the first step in providing them, like me when I started 4th grade, the specialized services they need to succeed in school.
I do not argue against the notion that words and labels matter. Instead, I assert that the reality of how children learn sometimes contradicts adults’ concern with more “equitable” terminology in education.
