Research-Based Strategies for Working with Multilingual Writers
Recent Perspectives from Research about Multilingual Writers’ Experiences
Instructors often assume that language skills (or lack thereof) are the root cause of a multilingual (or ESL) writer’s lack of success on a writing assignment. Indeed, research about fostering success for multilingual writers has traditionally focused on language-related issues, particularly fluency in reading and writing in English. However, multilingual students’ language proficiency is only one factor in their writing; increasing their English language grammar skills is not always a solution to specific writing issues or challenges.
Beyond English language proficiency, research has explored other factors that negatively affect multilingual students’ academic success, including:
- Not asking for help, including questions about course content, grades, and extensions on deadlines (Lee)
- Being a novice in a particular genre or discourse community (Lubis; Mur-Dueñas)
- Lacking experience with writing strategies in their first language (Guo and Huang)
All student writers can benefit from instruction that helps them understand expectations of your discipline, the genre, and specific assignments.
Strategies for Working with Multilingual Writers
Framing writing assignments
- Try to make expectations for writing clear, striking a balance between providing detailed instructions and prompts without overwhelming students with information. The right balance will be different based on the individual student’s needs.
- Have clear evaluation criteria and rubrics that show students how they will be assessed. Help them understand how to use the rubric by identifying the priority areas.
- Provide students with models of successful writing that match your assignment criteria. Know that if you give students a model, the most novice writers will likely follow it exactly. For this reason, it could also be helpful to provide multiple models that use different strategies to help students understand what choices they have to make.
- Get to know your students. Students usually have the most difficulty writing when they are writing a particular genre (e.g. research paper, lab report, discussion post) for the first time. You won’t know if your students are approaching a genre for the first time unless you ask them!
Responding to writing assignments
- Focus on global concerns related to what your assignment is meant to assess.
- Respond as a reader, not as an editor. Your feedback should help students learn rather than point out what is “wrong” or “fixing” the paper. Use the phrase “as a reader” to help guide your feedback (e.g. “as a reader, it would have been helpful if your thesis mentioned ___” or “as a reader, I find the use of this evidence effective because ___”).
- Ignore grammar issues that don’t affect your ability to understand the content (see more in the next section about responding to grammar errors).
Talking to students one-on-one
- Understand that a students’ written English and spoken English are often very different. They may have deep experience with academic writing in formal education but very little experience with spontaneous speaking. They may have spent summers socializing in summer camps in England but were educated in an entirely different language, resulting in advanced speaking and listening skills with little experience in formal, academic writing. It is very common for there to be a mismatch between students’ written language and their spoken language.
- Help students navigate resources about grammar knowing that they may already have resources that they use.
- Encourage students to keep an inventory of grammar issues to help them track their progress. It can be frustrating to feel like you’re not making any progress in a language. Students are likely making progress, but they may not have a way to track it. Help them compare papers from early in the semester to now and keep track of what kinds of and how many grammar issues they have over time. The degree to which this is helpful depends on individual students and their goals.
Further Reading
Guo, Xiaoqian, and Li-Shih Huang. “Are L1 and L2 Strategies Transferable? An Exploration of the L1 and L2 Writing Strategies of Chinese Graduate Students.” Language Learning Journal, vol. 48, no. 6, Dec. 2020, pp. 715–737.
Lee, Sei. “Frameworks for Failure in L2 Writing: What We Can Learn from ‘Failures’ of Chinese International Students in the US.” Journal of Second Language Writing, 41, 2018, 98-105.
Lubis, Arif-Hosein. “The Argumentation Structure of Research Article ‘Findings and Discussion’ Sections Written by Non-native English Speaker Novice Writers: A Case of Indonesian Undergraduate Students.” Asian Englishes, 22, 2, 2019, 143-162.
Mur-Dueñas, Pilar. “The Experience of a NNES Outer Circle Novice Scholar in Scholarly Publication.” Novice Writers and Scholarly Publication, edited by Habibie and Hyland, Springer, 2019.
