Teaching ESL/Multilingual Writers

“Meeting the Needs of Linguistically Diverse Students at the College Level”
Christa de Kleine, Notre Dame of Maryland University
Rachele Lawton, The Community College of Boston

In this white paper, Kleine and Lawton outline challenges of linguistically diverse college students and provide strategies for supporting these students. Overall, they suggest (1) increasing linguistic awareness at the institutional level, (2) avoiding deficit views of language variation, (3) working to place linguistically diverse students in the courses most appropriate to their language and credit needs. They conclude with a list of practical supports.

For Writing Consultants: Guidelines to Working with Non-Native Speakers
Developed by Renata Fitzpatrick, University of Minnesota
Adapted by Kit Hansen, University of Minnesota 

In this guide designed to assist university writing tutors working with multilingual writers, the authors provide a theoretical foundation of linguistic diversity and then suggest practical strategies to support linguistically diverse college writers. Most notably, they discuss how to prioritize the content of the tutoring sessions (pp. 9-10) and provide strategies to help writing tutors address areas of grammatical/syntactic/mechanical concern (pp. 12-16).

“Facilitating Success for Multilingual Students: Some Thoughts for Faculty”
Renata Fitzpatrick, Carleton College

In her column for faculty teaching multilingual students, Fitzpatrick draws on Canagarajah’s (2005) perspective of “difference-as-resource” to encourage faculty to reorient deficit views of linguistically diverse students. Advice is included for structuring courses/syllabi, selecting readings, building in-class activities, designing assignments, and responding to students’ writing. Fitzpatrick concludes with a useful table detailing cultural differences regarding plagiarism viewpoints.

“Critical Literacy and Second Language Learning”
Allan Luke and Karen Dooley; Queensland University of Technology

This review chapter provides a definition of critical literacy and ways that this skill can be taught to students in the classroom. The authors put forth that an increased globalized society is leading to increased marginalization of non-native English speakers. Two strategies to address these issues are to practice critical pedagogy and critical text analyses both explained in more detail within the review text.

Teaching with Writing 
University of Missouri

Through this website we seek to further the mission of the MU Campus Writing Program by offering a resource that supports faculty using “writing-to-learn” and “learning-to-write” principles in their classroom teaching. The posts included here are written by faculty for faculty, with a specific focus on teaching critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and disciplinary writing.