Knowing Your Students’ Language Backgrounds

Who multilingual learners are

“Multilingual learner” describes a very wide group. In one OCTC class, it can include an international student who studied English for years in school, an adult who moved to Kentucky as a refugee and is now in a technical program, and a student who grew up in Owensboro speaking another language at home and has used English at school since kindergarten. These students have little in common except that they use more than one language.

The CCCC statement makes three points that matter in a classroom:

• Literacy in the first language varies widely. “Multilingual writers can have a wide range of literacies in their first languages.” Some students have written research papers in another language; others learned to read and write mainly in English.
• Expectations about writing vary too. “Multilingual writers may demonstrate different expectations for and understandings of discourse,” such as how directly to state a claim, or how to use a source.
• Many students do not use the label. “Not all students self-identify as ‘ESL,’ ‘multilingual,’ or ‘second language’ students.” A student who grew up in the U.S. may not think of themselves as a language learner at all, and may not welcome being treated as one.

The practical result: you usually cannot tell from a name, an accent, or one piece of writing what a student knows, what they need, or how they see themselves. The statement asks instructors to “consider students’ individual experiences and avoid reducing students to stereotypes.”

Six practices

1. Design for the whole range, then adjust

   Clear prompts, annotated models, defined terms, and written versions of spoken instructions help every student, and they help multilingual learners most. The other Instructor Companion pages give specific ways to do this. Start there before you single out any student.

2. Ask every student the same open question

   Early in the term, ask the whole class one optional question about how they learn, such as the one under “Wording you can copy.” The CCCC statement encourages writing programs to learn about students’ language use and backgrounds. In a single course, a voluntary question asked of everyone does this without singling anyone out.

3. Never ask about nationality or status

   Do not ask where a student is “really” from, about citizenship or immigration status, or for documents. None of it is needed to teach writing well. Questions about languages and learning are enough, and students may skip them.

4. Do not judge ability from language alone

   Errors in English sentences are not evidence of weak thinking, poor preparation, or low effort. A student can build a strong argument in sentences that still show a second language. Read for the ideas first. The CCCC statement notes that second language prose can “violate” an instructor’s “aesthetic expectations for academic English,” and asks instructors to look for “the textual features that are rhetorically effective.”

5. Offer support to everyone, by name

   Instead of telling one student to “get help with English,” tell the whole class where help is: the Teaching and Learning Center, and the toolkit pages for each skill. Students choose what they need, and nobody is marked as needing it.

6. Treat multilingualism as a strength

   Students who work across languages notice how language works. When it fits the course, invite comparisons: how a task, a concept, or a form of writing works in another language a student knows. Make it an invitation, never a requirement.

Before and after

Both messages respond to the same draft: a strong argument, with frequent errors in articles and verb tense.

What changed

• The question about the student’s first language is gone. It was not needed to give useful feedback.
• The ideas come first. The student learns what is working.
• “Grammar” became two named patterns, with marked examples and a page for each.
• The TLC is offered as a resource, not a requirement tied to a label.

Wording you can copy

An optional question for the first week

For the syllabus

Links for students

No student page pairs with this one directly, on purpose. Students do not need to know they are part of a group to find help. Link the whole toolkit, or a skill page for the task in front of them:

• The toolkit home page, for the full list of topics.
• Interacting in class: common expectations, for expectations in U.S. college classes that are often unstated.
• College terms you will hear in your first weeks, for students new to college vocabulary.

For which terms to use when you talk or write about multilingual learners, see Terms for language learners: what to use, and when.

Sources

• Conference on College Composition and Communication. (2020). CCCC statement on second language writing and multilingual writers (opens in a new tab). See Part One, “General Statement”; Part Four, “Cultural Beliefs Related to Writing” and “Response to Student Writing”; and Part Five, “Collecting Information on Language Use and Language Background.”