Preparing teacher candidates for bilingual practices: toward a multilingual stance in mainstream teacher education

Teacher preparation programs throughout the United States have begun to include issues of second language teaching and learning in their curriculum in an effort to better prepare their teacher candidates to meet the needs of the increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse student population in K-12 schools. In this article, we argue for the importance of including the development of a multilingual stance in these efforts, which is mainstream teacher candidates' willingness and ability to engage in bi/multilingual practices. The article first reviews recent efforts that shows the importance of using students' full linguistic repertoire in teaching bilingual learners across classroom settings, including mainstream classrooms. It then provides a synthesis of practices in teacher education that aim to scaffold teacher candidates' development of a multilingual stance. We conclude with suggestions for further research and implications for teacher preparation.