Monolingual Ideologies in the Discourse of US College Remediation Reform

Remediation reform is an influential policy movement in U.S. higher education that aims to increase college completion rates. College first-year reading and writing course requirements have been a major focus of this movement, particularly prerequisite "developmental" course sequences for entering students who are deemed underprepared for college. However, the policy implications of this movement remain unclear for the growing number of multilingual students entering U.S. colleges and universities, and particularly for multilingual learners (MLLs) who are still in the process of developing college-level English proficiency. Accordingly, this paper examined the policy discourse on websites of three prominent remediation reform movement (RRM) organizations to identify explicit and implicit ideologies about language, multilingualism, and literacy that underlie reform policies. Using a Critical Discourse Studies approach to language education policy analysis (Barakos, 2016) and focusing specifically on lexical choice, we find that RRM organizational websites discursively maintain and promote English monolingualism as the normative medium and goal of college literacy instruction. Using a California-based RRM organization as an example, we also suggest that the prevailing English monolingual ideology of the RRM may be moderated by context. Based on these findings we suggest further research and consider implications for RRM college language and literacy education policies for MLL and other multilingual students.