Supporting Multilingual Student Writers at FIU

1. Supporting Multilingual Student Writers at FIU A Short Training for English Composition Teaching Assistants Sept. 26 2017 Ming Fang, PhD (mifang@fiu.edu)

2. Our multilingual students: (Survey results from Spring 2017) • ENC 1101 students: • 47% of students considered English their first language, followed by 33% who spoke Spanish first. 34% always or mostly speak English with parents and siblings; 31% use English in combination with another language at home; 36% said their family doesn’t speak English much. • 65% had all their schooling in the US, while 14% attended schools in the US for no more than 3 years. • ENC 1102 students: • 53% of respondents considered English their first language, and 40% considered Spanish their first language. 35% always or mostly speak English with parents and siblings; 39% use English in combination with another language at home; 26% said their family doesn’t speak English much. • 79% had all their schooling in the US, while 6% attended schools in the US for no more than 3 years.

3. Different groups of multilingual students? • Immigrant Students/generation 1.5 – completed some or all of their high school education in the US. • May not have academic fluency in L1; some academic fluency in L2. • Strengths: comfort in spoken English, variety of vocabulary. • Weaknesses: grammar, understanding of tone, style, and register. • International Students - completed high school in a foreign country. • Academically fluent in L1. • Strengths: proficient in writing, strong background in grammar. • Weaknesses: often uncomfortable with spoken English, American academic style, vocabulary may be limited.

4. How can we support multilingual students in our class? • Classroom Strategies • Assignment Strategies • Feedback Strategies

5. Classroom Strategies • Background Survey: • On the first day of class, it can be very useful to give students a short background survey so the students who might need additional linguistic support may be identified early-on. • Teaching methods: • Because multilingual students’ linguistic competencies may be varied, their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills may not be balanced. • It is useful to give clear directions in both spoken & written forms (i.e. tell students & write on the board). • Similarly, multilingual students may be shy to speak up in class. • Activities such as think/write-pair-share can be useful to give these students confidence to speak up in group discussions.

6. Assignment Strategies • Design assignments that are relevant to students’ multilingual experience • Provide clear assignment prompts, • Provide clear grading rubrics/expectations, • Provide models of what a paper should look like, • And scaffold assignments: provide opportunities for practice, support students’ reading comprehension, build up a writing process.

7. Feedback Strategies • Prioritize grading criteria: Solve higher order concerns before turning to lower order concerns. • Strategic error feedback: Focus on grammar problems that often interfere with clarity and seriously interfere. Notice error patterns. • Respond as an interested reader: As you read, indicate your interest in specific passages/ideas. Write an end comment that reveals your interest in the student’s ideas. • Encouraging self-editing and proof reading: Students will improve more quickly if they are trained to find and fix their own errors.

8. Two basic principles with multilingual students: • #1 Forget that they are multilingual learners. • Most of what they need is what your monolingual English-speaking students need as well • Good pedagogy for MLLs is good pedagogy for all. • #2 Always remember that they are multilingual learners. • Anticipate language-specific issues. • Address individual writing development needs. Balance the Yin and Yang!

9. Online Resources for Students • Dave’s ESL Café (http://www.eslcafe.com/): This is a great site with everything you can possibly imagine. Of particular use are the Help Center, which will answer your ESL questions 24 hours a day; the Quiz page, on which you can test yourself on points of grammar; the Student Link page, which provides links to many ESL sites on the Web. Also fun to look at are the Idiom and Phrasal Verb pages. • Purdue OWL: English as a Second Language http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/5/ This website provides a number of resources for ESL teachers and tutors as well as grammar and writing exercises. • Online Writing Assistant (http://www.powa.org/): This site has very good, very thorough information about all aspects of writing, including: Writing Argumentative Essays, Organizing Your Essays, and Revising and Editing Your Essays. • Guide to Grammar and Writing (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/): This whole site is very good. Unlike many grammar sites, it offers advice on sentences and paragraphs. • Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tricks for Better Writing Podcast (http://grammar.qdnow.com/): A weekly podcasts on all things grammar.

10. Online Resources for Students • Online English Grammar (http://www.edufind.com/english/grammar/toc.cfm): This site offers a complete grammar handbook. • Grammarly Handbook (https://www.grammarly.com/handbook/): Another grammar handbook that offers explanation of different grammatical points, as well as simple concepts of writing. • The Academic word list (http://www.rong-chang.com/awlmenu.htm): The most common words in U.S. academic writing. This list is good for building vocabulary. • Downloadable English Grammar Tutorials (http://ctl.yale.edu/writing/resources-multilingual-writers/downloadable-english-grammar-tutorials): This site offers tutorials on specific grammatical points. Practice exercises and additional resources are included within each tutorial to help students master each lesson.

11. Online Resources for Instructors: • Suggestions on helping non-native writers (http://writing.umn.edu/tww/responding/quicknns.html) • Advices and resources on teaching multilingual students (http://writing.berkeley.edu/resource/fair-faculty-teaching-multilingual-students): a lot of good resources and handouts on strategies and resources working with multilingual students. • Suggestions on teaching writing in a multilingual university: http://depts.washington.edu/writeuw/writingmultilingual.html