The expansive language access framework: an integrated approach to addressing oppression in language education

Abstract

While language education programs were created with an equity stance in mind—with the goals of increasing access and facilitating academic success for ethnically and linguistically marginalized students—the larger educational context has compromised access for multiply marginalized students. Recognizing a need for more complex understandings of language access, scholars have turned to intersectionality; however, intersectional theory is often applied to individual encounters rather than systemic issues. In this conceptual paper, we showcase how this unitary and unidimensional approach manifests in policies, programs, and conceptualizations of languages and language practices that perpetuate the systematic marginalization of multilingual learners with disabilities (MLwDs). We illustrate how policy and programming have centered language while omitting critical perspectives of race and disability. By focusing on MLwDs, we demonstrate how MLs who are racialized and pathologized through language have been systematically ignored in ways that sustain systems of oppression. The expansive language access framework provides a structure for understanding what it would mean to attend to race, language, and dis/ability at the policy, program, and practice levels, and can thus serve as a tool for stakeholders (e.g., scholars, policymakers, educators) to critically examine, evaluate, and rethink their role in perpetuating and disrupting institutional oppressions that multiply marginalized students encounter. Ultimately, we hope the framework empowers stakeholders to identify opportunities for growth and expansion to increase access to more holistically responsive language programming.