Using language-expansive approaches to prepare preservice teachers to teach science with multilingual learners

Abstract

The current vision for equitable and reform-oriented science education emphasizes that all students should engage in language-rich science practices to make sense of natural phenomena. Yet, for multilingual learners, equitable participation requires teaching that expands what counts as language and sensemaking in science. This article introduces language-expansive approaches to science teacher education, which draw from translanguaging theory to position language as fluid, multimodal, and dynamic. Language-expansive pedagogy invites preservice teachers (PSTs) to recognize and leverage students’ full communicative repertoires—including home languages, gestures, drawings, and other semiotic resources—as legitimate tools for doing and communicating science. Building on findings from a larger study of 23 science teacher educators (STEs) whose work centers on equitable and justice-oriented reform in science education, this practitioner piece shares approaches used by STEs who hold expansive orientations toward language and science. These STEs designed learning experiences that foregrounded critical stance-taking and reflection, encouraging PSTs to interrogate how dominant, racialized, and monolingual norms shape what counts as scientific knowledge and discourse. Through intentional modeling, dialogue, and analysis of classroom examples, these STEs helped PSTs reimagine multilingualism as a resource for scientific sensemaking rather than a barrier to overcome. We offer concrete strategies that STEs can adapt in their own courses to cultivate PSTs’ “language for science” perspectives and to center language justice in science instruction. By shifting from English-dominant models of integration toward transformative re-conceptualizations of language and science, this work contributes to advancing equity-oriented science teacher education.