Jiangping Cai’s project considers native English speakers who are learning non-English languages in a foreign language program in a university setting. Despite multilingualism having become the norm in the global movement of people and information, foreign language enrollments in the United States have been on the decline.

Researchers studying second language acquisition have traditionally focused on the cognitive process of language acquisition, instead of the lived experiences of language learning. This has led to the negative view of multilingual learners as deficient speakers who can never achieve the competence of native speakers. Cai’s project, however, argues that language learning is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Multilingual learners’ language learning is situated in social practices and interactions, which may limit or offer opportunities for learners to listen, speak, read, or write.

By centering multilingual learners’ lived experiences within the personal, social and cultural contexts, Jiangping’s project reveals the complex story of language learning. It will provide a better understanding of multilingual learners in all positions, roles, and experience, afford insights for how pedagogical practices and environments impact language learning, and shed lights on how to disrupt the monolingual ideology in the United States.