This article presents data from a 2013 survey of students enrolled in a longstanding rhetoric and composition Ph.D. program at the University of Louisville (U of L), a mid-sized public institution in the American South. The survey collected data regarding graduate students’ perceptions of language diversity in the context of their professional development as composition teacher-scholars. It interprets the data in relationship to what Yasemin Yildiz has described as the “postmonolingual condition” of 21st century Western social life: a field of tension between monolingualist ideology and increasingly visible multilingual practices. Drawing from student recommendations, it suggests ways this program, and others like it, can leverage students’ positive perceptions of and attitudes toward multilingualism to norm language differences in its mainstream rhetoric and composition graduate curriculum.

This article links language requirements in rhetoric and composition graduate programs to a dominant monolingualist ideology in composition studies. It argues that future faculty can be best prepared to conduct disciplinary work in the context of linguistic heterogeneity through a variety of collaborative pedagogical practices that reflect and advance a “translingual” language ideology.