Problem 1: “We Need More”
Multilingual learners, students who navigate school in more than one language, are the majority population in many international schools. As schools become more culturally and linguistically diverse, all teachers need to develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to effectively teach multilingual learners (Yoon, 2023; Rutt et al., 2021; Facella et al., 2005).
Because multilingual learners and EAL specialists have been sidelined in traditional EAL programs, a scarcity mindset persists. As a result, EAL specialists may advocate for more EAL staffing, more EAL materials, and more time for supporting multilingual learners to catch up with their English-proficient peers. However, we have observed a paradox in many international schools. A well-trained EAL department can hinder the success of multilingual learners. This paradox manifests in three ways.
First, the “safe haven” argument for pull-out EAL classes persists in far too many schools. The argument has always been that emergent bilinguals benefit from specialized and appropriate instruction to ensure smooth transition, academic orientation, and social integration. However, segregating a large (and growing) portion of a school’s population for large portions of the day thus preventing access to grade-level curriculum, can marginalize both students and teachers.
Second, even where schools have shifted to collaborative and inclusive models, many instances perpetuate the mindset that the responsibility for multilingual learners primarily rests with EAL specialists. If a 9th-grade math teacher knows that the EAL specialist is there to explain the math content to multilingual learners, that teacher may not feel the urgency to learn how to make the math accessible for the entire class. Similarly, if an elementary homeroom teacher knows the EAL specialist will be visiting during the literacy block, they may hand off the small group of multilingual learners to the specialist. Both scenarios reflect a deficit-minded “pull-out inside the classroom” model, and in both cases, we see language specialists teaching academic content that lies outside their fields of expertise.
Third, well-trained EAL specialists are skilled at making academic content accessible to multilingual learners. When these specialists are not given structured opportunities to share their skills with colleagues in their respective content areas, their valuable expertise is woefully underutilized. Schools waste both financial and human resources when they pay an EAL specialist to observe a colleague teach, or worse, when the EAL specialist is expected to be the only one in the room responsible for facilitating multilingual learners’ access to content (Nordmeyer & Honigsfeld, 2023). With current and future demographics, such models are no longer effective, nor acceptable. Students need to be not simply “included,” but fully integrated and meaningfully engaged in classrooms by all teachers.
Opportunity 1: “We Need Different”
A changing demography is not a warning to hire more EAL specialists or to conceive of inclusion as classrooms where EAL specialists are assigned within a caseload support framework. Doing so suggests that schools adhere to a medical model approach, whereby EAL specialists are hired to “fix” non-proficient English students (Rojas, 2023). School policies, programs, and practices remain the same as what they were when many international schools were founded for Anglophone, expatriate students, underpinned mainly by monolingual ideologies with an understanding of non-English proficiency as a problem (Ascenzi-Moreno et al, 2015; Bettney & Nordmeyer, 2021; Huckle, 2025; Hult & Hornberger, 2016; Rojas, October 2022). It is increasingly clear that this language-as-a-problem orientation, manifested in deficit thinking, is no longer concomitant with the new “types” of international schools about which much has been written (Asher & Pichery, 2024; ICS Research, 2023; Bettney & Nordmeyer, 2021; Huckle, 2025; Limerick, N. et al, 2024).
International school leaders are called upon to think differently, to navigate the opportunities afforded by the shifting linguistic landscape, and to forge a school-wide multilingual ecosystem, replete with an organizational identity that recognizes multilingualism as a resource, rather than a problem to be solved (Huckle, 2025; Rojas, 2023). To effect real change, leaders begin by reframing traditional EAL teachers as multilingual learning specialists, not just in name, but with pioneering roles and responsibilities. Well-defined expectations are articulated that these specialists must possess the critical understandings, knowledge, and skills to create spaces that challenge dominant monolingual and deficit narratives, initiate structural changes in programming and pedagogy, and adopt more favorable practices towards multilingual learners and their languages (Ascenzi-Moreno et al., 2015). In short, multilingual learning specialists evolve into consultants to inaugurate a multilingual organizational identity, collaborate on content and language-integrated learning, and serve as instructional coaches for shaping a sustainable multilingual advocacy ecosystem in all classrooms (Rojas, 2023).
Multilingual Learning Specialists as Consultants
Multilingual learning specialists as consultants signal an opportunity to develop perspectives in which multilingualism is valued and in which students are not defined by how they are classified in an elaborate support services system designed for linguistic minority groups in Anglophone contexts. They offer customized professional development workshops and engage in informal conversations to dispel myths deeply rooted in monolingual ideologies and language-as-problem orientations, aspiring to transcend the mistaken mindset that multilingual learners in mainstream classes negatively impact academic rigor and performance (Bettney Heidt & Olsen-Wyman, 2025; Huckle, 2025; Rojas, October 2022). Multilingual learning specialists as consultants facilitate the extent to which language policies and practices capture the language-as-a-resource orientation, not only in terms of English acquisition, but also to include world and community (host) languages as a part of developing the complex and multilingual identity to which many schools aspire for their graduates (Forbes & Morea, 2024; Nordmeyer, 2020).
Multilingual Learning Specialists as Collaborators
A further way to shift from a caseload mindset is to reenvision how multilingual learning specialists collaborate with classroom teachers. Their workload would be better utilized by collaborating with all teachers on a rotating basis to help them think of language as a tool for communicating ideas. For example, a multilingual learning specialist provides opportunities for science teachers to practice aligning language objectives, enabling students to explore phenomena, interpret data, and produce evidence-based explanations orally or in writing (Lyon & Mackura, 2023; Tai et al., 2025). They offer demonstration lessons showing how to tap into learners’ linguistic resources to structure cohesive explanations, add details and enrich ideas, and connect and condense ideas (Lyon & Mackura, 2023). Multilingual learning specialists collaborate with grade-level and departmental leaders to develop checklists and protocols that keep planning meetings on track, steering classrooms away from the well-intended but ill-advised simplification of materials, modification of tasks, frontloading of vocabulary, and provision of sentence starters, all remnants of deficit thinking and the medical approach (Rojas, October 2022; 2023). When all educators adopt approaches that integrate language and content and utilize strategies that capitalize on learners’ strengths, they begin to address unresolved questions they may have about focusing on disciplinary literacies while making subject matter accessible to students (Asher & Pichery, 2024; Nordmeyer et al, 2021; Rojas, November 2022; Tai et al, 2025).
Multilingual Learning Specialists as Coaches
As classroom teachers become more proficient with multilingual mindsets and fluent in content and language integrated practices, they, in consultation with multilingual learning specialists, revisit English-only instruction and assessment tools. Translanguaging is a transformative force because it reverses the view that multilingual learners are language-deficient to one in which their home languages are valued as linguistic resources. Multilingual learning specialists raise teachers’ awareness and facilitate their growth in transitioning from the spontaneous use of translanguaging as a temporary scaffold to strategically planned translanguaging, resulting in more equitable and efficiently organized learning and assessment experiences (Rojas, November 2022). As coaches, they help teachers leverage technology-mediated translanguaging spaces, promoting the use of multiliteracies projects that utilize communication modes beyond traditional reading and writing to engage students and foster critical thinking (Esperat, 2024; Tai, 2025). Imagine multilingual learning specialists coaching content and language teachers alike to develop multilingualism among all international school students, including English monolingual students, as they acquire an additional language to prepare for a complex, interconnected, and multilingual world (Forbes & Morea, 2024).
Decisions matter, and their impact accumulates over time. Countless decisions have been made regarding international schools and students for whom English might be a second or third language in a multilingual world. Maintaining the status quo of policies and approaches without reexamining the ever-evolving linguistic landscape of international schools, or of becoming more aware of ongoing multilingual research, leaves many asking for more of the same. The opportunity to not just do more of what has been done in the past, which, as it turns out, is not quite as good as it might have been, is upon us.
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Dr. Gini Rojas coordinates the EAL certification program in partnership with the Principals’ Training Center. Before semi-retiring to Mexico, she was a faculty member for the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and a language education consultant for over 350 international schools. She is an inductee into the Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIE) Hall of Fame .
Jon Nordmeyer is the founding co-director of the Multilingual Learning Research Center (MLRC), a research-practice partnership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The MLRC facilitates innovative and socially just research, both within schools and across schools, to improve educational outcomes for multilingual learners.
