Two Voices, Many Languages’:A Duoethnographic Look at Multilingual Identity in Teaching Spaces in a UK University

Abstract

Despite the dominance of English and entrenched monolingual norms in UK higher education (HE), campuses are increasingly characterised by multilingual realities driven by intensified international mobility and internationalisation of HE. Many graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) and students come from multilingual backgrounds and routinely move across languages. While scholarly attention to multilingual identity in educational settings is growing, GTAs’ experiences within this framework remain overlooked. To bridge the gap by answering calls to reimagine universities as multilingual spaces and to harness peer dialogue for GTA professional development, this study employs duoethnography to stage a critical conversation between two multilingual GTAs. Informed by Morea & Fisher’s (2023) model of teachers’ multilingual identities, we ask: How are our own and our students’ evolving multilingual identities positioned in day-to-day teaching, and what affordances or constraints emerge within English-dominant pedagogical discourses? Through a reflective thematic analysis of our peer dialogue data, three key themes emerge: 1) managing our evolving relationship with ‘Native Speakerism’, 2) negotiating professional roles and personal identity through language use, 3) coping with emotional complexities of multilingual teaching. This study shows that multilingual identity is simultaneously a pedagogical asset and a site of struggle. By articulating these tensions, the study offers GTAs, GTA developers and programme leads practical leverage points for change, such as normalising translanguaging, fostering collaborative reflection on linguistic diversity, circulating language-inclusive teaching tips and foregrounding multilingual perspectives in departmental discussions, which may incrementally unsettle monolingual norms and cultivate more equitable, intellectually vibrant learning environments in UK HE.