Picture a classroom. Whatever your mind imagines, from elementary school to high school or beyond, the fixtures likely include desks, whiteboards, writing utensils, and principally, students. The learning that occurs in a classroom is defined by the lessons and conversations shared by students and teachers alike, and the language — or languages — they communicate in.
In my freshman year of high school, my introductory psychology course was taught in English and Spanish, with its daily lessons and discussions repeated in both. Many of my classmates there spoke Spanish, as did our teacher, and so our classroom and the ways we interacted with one another reflected the languages we most commonly spoke. Outside of specific foreign language classes, that class was the first time I experienced the multilingual backgrounds of students being represented in a formal school environment.
The linguistic diversity of students in the United States extends into almost every classroom, and far beyond two languages. Increasing access to all kinds of language education, from English language learning to immersion models to sequential world language courses, represents an incredibly important endeavor to include all students in curricula and encourage students to better understand other cultures. In short: embracing linguistic backgrounds, and the ideal of pluralism along with, requires actively pursuing language education in schools.
Multilingual classrooms can acknowledge the large role a person’s language background plays in their identity. Matthew Bacon-Brenes, now retired, spent 15 years at Portland Public Schools’ Mt. Tabor Middle School teaching Japanese language and social studies classes, as well as supporting dual language immersion teachers of less commonly taught languages across the district. He sees language education programs as being able to embrace and value a variety of heritages. “When you walk in the door, your bilingualness, multilingualness, is valued here. It’s not just something that you do on the side, and it’s not just cute,” he says. “It’s something that we see as an important part of identity.”
Linguistic diversity has expanded in recent decades, with the number of Americans who speak a language other than English at home nearly tripling to 67.8 million between 1980 and 2019, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report. Overall, the U.S. is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, with hundreds of languages spoken.
National rhetoric doesn’t always suggest the country contains those multitudes, though. “Particularly now, it feels like to be American, you have to be English-speaking,” remarks Bacon-Brenes, who describes the notion as “ugly and exclusionary.” In 1917, in the midst of World War I, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that, “In this country we must have but one flag, the American flag; but one language, the English language.” However, until recently, this sentiment has never been reflected in the government by anything more than English being the de facto language of the U.S.. Constitutionally, the absence of a designated national language prevented the violation of minority groups’ freedom of speech, in a country that already didn’t solely speak English at its advent. President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14224 in March of 2025, which proclaimed English the official language of the U.S., is a more recent addition to the political conversation of linguistic diversity — one that endangers the country’s very real linguistic diversity. The most tangible impacts of the executive order, which also revoked the Clinton-era Executive Order 13166 that reiterated and sought to improve access to services for individuals with limited English proficiency, are found in the federal government. Still, walking back accessibility for Americans for whom English is not their first or most proficient language and centering the importance of English above all strikes a chord throughout the country: it affirms the growing ideology that rejects differences in identities.
“The history of bilingual education is like a roller coaster,” comments Alexandra Babino, an associate professor of literacy and language at Texas Woman’s University. She explains that the nationally-dominant language ideology — today described as English hegemony — largely reflects the ideas of those with more political power, not representative of the people.
Some national moves have encouraged the teaching of foreign languages, like the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which includes foreign languages as part of its “well-rounded education” model. Still, strapped budgets across the nation resulting from funding cuts have often pressed public education to cut programs, putting languages on the proverbial chopping block.
English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction — specialized direction for non-fluent English speakers to improve their English skills — is a key component of multilingualism in schools. “If people are able to speak the same language, the result is more equity and access to more opportunities,” explains Lisa Palm, an English for Speakers of Other Languages instructor and volunteer literacy coordinator for ESL and Adult Basic Education classes at Portland Community College. Access to ESL or other supplementary language instruction in order for students to receive meaningful access to education is a right in the U.S., under the 1974 Supreme Court Case Lau v. Nichols.
ESL is a step towards equity in schooling, particularly as English learners experience a significantly and persistently lower high school graduation rate than the national average. English learning programs are critical to ensure equitable access to curriculum for all students, and to be prepared to continue with English-language services in the world outside schools. “Linguistically diverse classrooms are a reflection of real life outside of school,” says Palm.
However, a hyperfocus on English learning as the sole part of language education is representative of the tale of homogenizing a country’s diverse linguistic background. Babino compares English hegemony to the Kool-Aid Man’s destructive, bust-through-the-wall entrances: “Wherever it goes, it takes up space, and it takes up more space than it needs or is required.” When English proficiency is thought of as the exclusive goal of language learning, it creates a narrative of assimilation, of “throwing off individual cultures to [join into] the melting pot,” she says. Perhaps a better metaphor, Babino proposes, is a salad, in which “each individual piece retains its parts and its qualities, but all together, creates something unified and new that’s different.”
There is clear value in preserving and engaging with the many different languages spoken by students. “For linguistically marginalized folks, it would be humanizing them by being able to be their whole selves and use their full linguistic repertoire,” explains Babino. “[Linguistically diverse classrooms] are also part of historical reparations for communities who’ve lost their languages.”
Many bilingual students come into school already speaking two languages. Babino describes this as “simultaneous bilingualism,” in which students have learned two languages at the same time because of their life circumstances — most commonly their family. For these students, being included in a multilingual classroom might involve dual language immersion programs, a model of schooling in which lessons are taught in both English and another language throughout the day. Learners in immersion classrooms might be native speakers whose families speak the language at home, or learning a second language for the first time through these classes. The collaboration that can occur between speakers who have different experiences of the language in an immersion classroom can be mutually beneficial.
Still, encouraging new language learning in schools is important to ushering in greater cross-cultural understanding, and asserting diverse linguistic backgrounds as a valuable part of education and of America. According to the Institute of Education Sciences, at least 10.5 million students in the U.S. are learning a foreign language in school, a process that has been shown to form new connections in the brain and strengthen nervous system links. Multilingual people have also been shown to have better attention capacity and task-switching abilities, and fend off cognitive decline longer.
The concrete benefits of bilingualism aren’t just confined to cognitive function, but can impact many broader stretches of life. A 2019 meta-analysis from the British Academy found that students who are learning a second language tend to perform better academically than their monolingual peers. Similarly, survey findings by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages established that nine out of 10 U.S. employers rely on employees with additional language skills besides English — a need over half said would increase over the next five years.
However, learning another language is a contribution not only to one’s brain, grades, and future job prospects, but also to one’s peers. Learning new languages means learning a new world: both as students and as citizens, it can embed a deeper empathy for different experiences. “When you learn that things can be said in different ways, it can set you up for considering — not just linguistically, but in terms of ideas — how they could be presented, how something could be considered differently,” says Bacon-Brenes.
He’s right: though the often-sanitized public school curriculums may challenge this important aspect, the process of language learning can teach immense cultural knowledge of the people, cultures, lives, celebrations, and so much more behind the words. Babino affirms the importance of picking up the cultural knowledge within a language, saying that learning a language can help in “understanding different world views, how different communities view the world, different language practices, different cultural practices, and how that shows up, not just at the surface level.”
While the process of learning a language can be lengthy and bilingualism can feel routine to some speakers, perhaps there’s a loftier point to the very act of knowing another language. “It’s really an issue of values, and what do you value, and what do our communities value?” questions Babino. “If there’s a value for plurality, if there’s a value for equity and justice, then that will lead us down one set of decisions, but if you don’t, then again, we’re going to see a very different world.” Because trying to learn an additional language is a task that pushes a person to consider cultural background, it creates an opportunity to explore multiple perspectives. Not confined to classrooms or conversation, these perspectives can be both political and social, and can harbor intense impacts. Whether a would-be speaker acknowledges these, and embraces the value of an alternate viewpoint, is an individual reaction.
Embracing linguistic diversity in the classroom carries with it a political implication — that resources for bilingual and language-learning students at large deserve to be funded, that the identities of students who speak any and all languages are equally important and cherished in schools and in society at large. But there’s also a personal motive to study and learn to understand something seemingly vastly different from your own realm: languages can represent cultures that represent all kinds of people, and thus be a key to seeing a new perspective.
When Bacon-Brenes teaches his students kanji, one of the three Japanese writing systems, he implores them to look deeply. “You have to see it differently, you have to see it as beauty,” he says. When they examine the iconographic elements of kanji, “I always tell my kids, ‘These are pictures. Think about what went into making 10,000 kanji, what kind of endeavor that was for humans, and what the pieces are that are put together, [and] the stories that are told.’ That is so damn impressive.”
