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1. Acknowledge how talented multilingual writers are!
2.Resist the tendency to lump multilingual writers together in your thinking.
The UW student body comes from diverse continents, countries, cities, and home environments. Similarly, all of our students have different minds, unique bodies of knowledge, and varying degrees of proficiency in English and in their home language.
3. Talk often with multilingual students.
Holding one-on-one conferences throughout the semester to work on prewriting and drafts can benefit all students. Let your students do a lot of talking, especially to make sure they understand and have a good start on your writing assignment.
4. Get to know the multilingual writers in your class!
They bring intellectual curiosity, a range of experiences, and a unique perspective that your entire class can benefit from. Plus, you serve all students better when you get to know them.
5. Think carefully about unspoken assumptions about successful writing in your course.
All students benefit from explicit expectations for each assignment communicated in both writing and in conversation.
6. Incorporate models into your curriculum.
For example, if you’re assigning a thesis-driven paper, supply your students with models of thesis-driven essays from your course or discipline. Models may be articles that you’ve already built into the syllabus or anonymous samples of student writing obtained from students who’ve given you permission to use their essays as teaching materials. Spend time in class discussing and critiquing features of the models.
7. As much as possible, give multilingual writers “more of everything” that helps monolingual writers: clear assignments, time for multiple drafts, individual conferences, models of good writing, etc.
8. Prioritize which errors to mark.
Rather than commenting on all errors, you should try to identify a few of the most common kinds of problems that make it difficult for you to understand a sentence—sentence-boundary problems, for example—rather than minor slips with articles.
9. Differentiate between errors that do not interfere with meaning and those that do.
Errors that do not interfere with meaning can involve: articles, e.g., “We must protect the nature” (Leki, 1992, p. 114);prepositions, e.g., “to mention about” or “to discuss about” (Leki, p. 119); verb forms, e.g., “By stop the destruction of the Amazon valley…,” (Leki, p.116)
Leki, Ilona. Understanding ESL Writers: A Guide for Teachers. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1992.
10. For errors that do interfere with meaning, signal that communication has broken down and ask a question that might help the writer clarify his or her thoughts and/or wording.
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