Multilingual scholars should look inward to better support learners, Northeastern researcher says
Professor Qianqian Zhang-Wu solicited the personal reflections of more than a dozen academic researchers to write about their experiences.
Multilingual scholars can benefit from reflecting on their own experience, a Northeastern University researcher concludes.
Qianqian Zhang-Wu, an assistant professor of English, says multilingual educators usually focus on how learners move back and forth between languages, but they can empower themselves by looking inward.
“We usually look outward at how our students use language,” says Zhang-Wu, who is the multilingual writing coordinator for Northeastern’s writing program. “But we ourselves can be marginalized in many ways, racially, linguistically. There isn’t enough space for us to look inwards.”
Zhang-Wu solicited the personal reflections of more than a dozen academic researchers from six continents to write about their experiences. Her goal: create a space where researchers can turn their focus to themselves and explore the complexities of thinking in multiple languages but teach in English.
The articles are compiled in the recently published book: “Autoethnographic Explorations of Lived Raciolinguistic Experiences Among Multilingual Scholars: Looking Inward to Move Forward.”
There is power in reflection, she says, as there is power in language. Writers in the book applied racial linguistic theory to their personal experiences, Zhang-Wu says, exploring the ways that language, race and power influence one another. Anyone who speaks English has an accent, she says, but scholars who have an accent from their mother tongue are often perceived as deficient.
“Regardless of your English proficiency, you’re considered linguistically incompetent by default simply because of your race,” she says. “Recent linguistic theory draws attention to colonial history and reminds people that language is not neutral. With this book, I tried to push people to use that theory to reflect on their own lived experiences.”
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In one article, a linguistics graduate student from Mongolia working on her Ph.D. in Australia writes that the way people perceive her accent makes her feel inadequate and afraid of making mistakes. But “our speech is not the determining factor,” she continues. “Rather, our appearance takes precedence. Even before we say a word, our physical presence conveys a message.”
That message, Zhang-Wu says, is often that the scholar’s language research isn’t as important as research conducted by a native English speaker.
Zhang-Wu grew up in Nanjing, China, and came to the United States as an international student to pursue graduate studies in education and bilingual research. In an article published in the collection, she writes that her name and Chinese accent contribute to her concern about being perceived as a “perpetual foreigner.”
“I pushed myself to triple-read every email I was about to send to eliminate any typos or grammatical errors,” she writes, “so that I could prove myself ‘qualified’ to be an atypical English professor.”
By collecting stories from multilingual scholars, Zhang-Wu hopes to highlight the unique strengths that multilingual scholars bring to their work. From her own experience helping multilingual students with their writing, Zhang-Wu says that her research focus has broadened to include how to support them in a predominantly white and “standard” English-dominant environment.
That work is the focus of a second book Zhang-Wu released this year, “Rethinking Multilingual Writers in Higher Education: An Institutional Case Study,” which explores the distinct and unique experiences of multilingual students in American universities.
Not all international students arrive in the U.S. with the same linguistic capabilities, she says, so students benefit from being treated as individuals — some of whom need language support and some who are already fluent in English.
“We’re fighting forward for many things by looking inward,” Zhang-Wu says. “Some are using their lived experience to fight for better research to advocate for students. Some people just feel empowered by reflecting on their own experiences.”
