Teaching Academic Writing to Multilingual Students
Many faculty wonder how to be more equitable when assigning and assessing the writing of multilingual students. For instance, given that multilingual students are arriving in the course with different levels of English fluency, should your standards for grading written work be different than for other students? When responding to student work, how much time should you spend on grammar and style at the sentence level versus comments on the structure or argument of the essay?
“Multilingual students” are not a monolithic group: they have varying experiences with and levels of English language acquisition skills, both written and spoken. Some may be international students living in the U.S., and being immersed in the English language, for the first time. Other international students might have grown up bilingual or trilingual, with English as an official “state language” in their home country. Still other students might have grown up in the U.S., speaking English at school and other languages at home.
While it would be impossible to account for each student’s experience of learning English, making writing expectations as clear and transparent as possible will benefit all of your students. We invite you to recognize language as a source of diversity in the Tufts community, and multilingualism as an opportunity to learn from different perspectives and broaden everyone’s understanding of language and writing.
Deepening Awareness and Making Transparent: Culturally Specific Conventions of Academic Writing (Teaching@Tufts)
Responding to Writing by Multilingual Students (Teaching@Tufts)
Resources for teaching multilingual students