Teaching Multilingual Writers

Fill in potential gaps in vocabulary and background knowledge for your particular course, as well as in useful student strategies. 
Consider breaking down the course-specific vocabulary in a way friendly to multilingual students. You might offer a “10 Terms You Might Not Know” handout near the beginning of the semester, which would be useful to all of your students who may be struggling with the background knowledge for your course content. Also consider introducing and modeling good reading strategies (pre-reading, predicting, skimming, scanning, annotating) during particular class activities near the beginning of the course; these strategies are of course useful to all of our students, especially as they begin to develop college-level study skills that work well for them. Help students develop, or remind them of, effective strategies for drafting, revising, editing, and getting work done early enough so they can look back on it or seek tutoring assistance.

Hint: Review our page on teaching the “hidden curriculum” of your course more explicitly, in order to make your class more inclusive of multilingual writers and indeed all learners.

Discern between errors of comprehension versus errors of production when reading students’ work; in other words, are students making an error because they didn’t understand the text or because they’ve chosen the wrong verb? Reading is often the biggest challenge for multilingual students, both for content and context.

Hint: Think creatively here! A trilingual Lebanese student in a WR 120 class that reads Camus–translated into English–might be more comfortable accessing the text in the original French, for example.

Remember that language acquisition is often two steps forward and one step back; as students attempt new and challenging tasks, constructions they have previously mastered may slip. As writing teachers, we know that all writers (regardless of their language background) have a unique set of strengths and needs, and we are used to individuating our feedback accordingly; this process is no different when working with multilingual writers, though some instructors wrestle with questions about assessment. During conferences, you can let your multilingual writers know individually what they need to do to achieve higher grades on the next papers.

Hint: Review our page on equity in writing assessment. Moving away from traditional writing assessments, including elements of grading contracts, and opening up your acceptance of papers that fall outside what Asao B. Inoue calls the “dominant academic discourse” are acts of racial and linguistic justice that we as instructors can do now, in our own classrooms, to help create a more inclusive and equitable environment. Finally, use these guidelines to consider how to respond to language errors in multilingual students’ writing.

Often multilingual students are reluctant to speak up in a mixed class for a variety of reasons: it may not be their cultural tradition; they may be shy about language skills; or they may have difficulty following the discussion. Draw them out; they may be timid about volunteering, but happy to speak if called on. Try to give all students–multilingual and monolingual students alike–the necessary support so they feel more comfortable participating in class.

• Have students bring their 1-2 most problematic passages from the reading to class; tell students explicitly that a welcome contribution to any discussion of a text is something like, “Actually, I had a really hard time with this reading. I was particularly lost on page ____, when the author says, _____.”
• Have students write one question and one comment per reading per day, for example, and bring them to class in written form or email them to you before class; that way they have a fall-back comment or question for discussion.
• Offer a 5-10 minute free-writing at the beginning of class on the question you’re going to open the discussion with. Then, when beginning the discussion, explicitly call on a student and say something like, “_________, tell us something you wrote in your response,” so that the students realize they actually do have an answer already.
• Put students in brainstorming groups for 10 minutes at the beginning of class, with a preview of the question you’re going to discuss as a full-class group.
• Split more discussions into smaller groups to begin with, since it’s generally both easier for students to talk and harder for them to avoid talking in a smaller group (split a topic into four parts say, and then have the groups report back to everyone else, or just run the groups in parallel with each other on the same question/topic).
• Structure your discussion questions with a more explicitly guided path toward a response. For example, “What do you think of this point?” tends to be less helpful than something like, “One possible response to the author’s point is ________, while someone else might argue _______. What do you think?” Similarly, you may direct students to turn to a specific page or even paragraph of the text before you ask a question about the reading.
• Consciously work on having much longer wait times. Ask a question, and then wait. Do not call on someone as soon as a student raises his hand. Look away from the students who are most likely to catch your eye and jump right in; wait, even for what is an uncomfortably long time for a native speaker of English. Longer wait times work–and they do–by both allowing for greater processing time (students parse your question, connect it to the text, think about the answer, try to phase the answer in academic language, and then get ready to say it) and by showing students that you’re serious about wanting their input.
• Deliberately invite students into the discussion, in conjunction with having longer wait times. Note that this strategy is not the same as merely “calling on” students; instead, scan the room after asking a question, with a neutral expression on your face, and catch someone’s eye, and smile, and nod, and just wait. Particularly if, the first few times you do this, you do it with students that you know, based on their writing, have interesting insights but are normally silent, you will find students do have something to say but just might not have been able to enter the discussion before.

Hint: Use group work in your classes more deliberately and more frequently. Also review our guide on leveling the playing field for class discussion for more tips. If you grade students’ class participation, consider co-constructing a rubric with them early on and asking them to do a reflection on their own participation at different points in the semester.

Guides & Tips

• Accessible Approaches to the Writing Classroom
• Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Reading Lists and Online Resources
• Effective Collaboration with Writing Centers
• Equity in Writing Assessment: Alternative Grading Approaches
• Faculty Guide to Teaching WR 111 and WR 112
• Leveling the Playing Field for Class Participation
• Responding to Multilingual Students’ Writing
• Strategies for Conferences and Tutoring Appointments with English Language Learners
• Suggested Readings for WR 112: Essays/Articles
• Suggested Readings for WR 112: Longer Works
• Teaching the Hidden Curriculum

Exercises & Handouts

• Advice to Students on Preparing for Oral Presentations
• Teaching with Student Journals in WR 111 or WR 112
• WR 112: Intercultural Literacy, Race, Racism, and Antiracism

Flipped Learning Modules

• Academic Integrity (Part 1): Avoiding Plagiarism
• Academic Integrity (Part 2): Quoting, Paraphrasing, Summarizing
• Claims
• Comparative Analysis
• Creating and Presenting Posters
• Debates
• Expanding Your Vocabulary
• Expectations for Academic Writing in the American Classroom
• Facilitating Discussions
• Integrating Ideas from They Say/I Say into your Writing
• Integrating the Writing Center into the Writing Program
• Oral Presentations for Multilingual Students (ELL)
• Outlining
• Paragraph Structure
• Passive Voice
• Pronoun Reference
• Pronoun Reference
• Pronunciation Priorities for Multilingual Students (ELL)
• Quotation Integration & In-text Citation
• Reading for Writing
• Sentence Structure
• Summarizing
• Tense Use in Academic Writing
• The Writing Process

Some multilingual students can benefit from a smaller, low-stakes group to work on focused practice speaking; FY 103: Pronunciation & Oral Communication for Multilingual Students is a one-credit Pass/Fail class that students of any class year can opt into.

WR 111: Academic Writing for ELL Students 1
WR 112: Academic Writing for ELL Students 2