Presented
by:
- Samantha Demmerle
- Brianna Hyslop
About the session:
Helping students develop academic and workplace writing
skills can be challenging, given the relatively short time we have with
students, the number of discipline-specific learning outcomes we have for our
courses, and the online methods through which we typically provide students
feedback on their writing.
Supporting the development of multilingual students –
i.e., students who speak more than one language and for whom English may not be
their first or primary language -- requires an even more thoughtful approach
from faculty. In these instances, the student may be a long-term U.S. resident
and current graduate student who has worked in the U.S. for years, or a
multilingual international undergraduate student currently adapting to U.S.
culture while also acclimating to a new academic program, as just a couple of
examples of the different lived experiences that exist among multilingual
students.
In this session, we’ll explore how to better support the
development of writing skills for multicultural, multilingual students in our
undergraduate and graduate programs at the Edwards Campus. We’ll also address
specific questions you have based on your observations and experiences working
with multilingual students in classroom-based and online courses.
In this session, we will explore:
- Discuss
the similarities and differences between monolingual and multilingual students
- Discuss
characteristics of the writing structure used in different cultures and
how these are different than Western and U.S. based structures
- Discuss
the process of learning to express ideas in a different language, and the
unique challenges of adapting to different genres of writing in a
different language (academic prose with source citation, business emails,
business reports, technical reports, etc.)
- Discuss
how to prioritize what to focus on when providing feedback on multilingual
student writing (i.e., grammar, structure, conciseness, etc.), both in
crafting learning outcomes for specific assignments and in feedback
provided on assignments
- Discuss the pros and cons of rubric-based vs. narrative feedback for supporting the development of multilingual, multicultural writers
- Discuss
strategies for crafting helpful, yet focused and efficient feedback,
including factors like content, length, structure, and method of feedback
- Answer
your specific questions related to best supporting multicultural,
multilingual student writers