1 / 18

Supporting Multilingual Writers: Strategies for Effective Language Acquisition at UWT

As a fifth-year MA TESOL student at UWT, I work with multilingual writers in the TLC Faculty. This initiative promotes effective support within our diverse academic community. I encourage students to utilize the TLC for assistance, check for cultural background awareness in assignments, and incentivize the correction of grammatical errors through positive reinforcement. Our goal is to facilitate language acquisition with explicit instruction while providing constructive feedback that emphasizes writing development rather than mere grammatical perfection.

chadwick-roberson
Télécharger la présentation

Supporting Multilingual Writers: Strategies for Effective Language Acquisition at UWT

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Multi-lingual Writers at UWT • Supporting them Effectively

  2. Hi, I’m Kelvin • 5th year at UWT • MA TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) • work with multilingual writers in the TLC

  3. Faculty Students (Academic Affairs)

  4. UWT: A multi-lingual community

  5. How you can help • encourage students to go to the TLC • check for cultural background knowledge integral to assignments • incentivize correction of grammatical errors in assignments (i.e. reward labor not perfection)

  6. Language Acquisition • is not on a quarter schedule • can be facilitated with explicit instruction • (See CCCC and TESOL position statements)

  7. Content & Language • commenting on content • organization • cohesion • assignment parameters • citation formatting • indicating grammatical errors • sentence structure • coherence • noting vocabulary issues • source integration

  8. Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) • Consider your purpose: writing development, language learning, “perfect grammar”? • For L2 writers, focused CF is more useful than unfocused CF • Labeled CF more likely more useful writers with prior explicit grammar instruction

  9. Corrective Feedback • Is more likely to be useful when revision is required (Ferris et al., 2013) • Neitherdirect feedback nor indirect feedback is always more useful • “does not guarantee learning” (Matsuda, 2012, p.155)

  10. Who’s/Whose Perfect? • Must students attain native-like grammatical accuracy? • Writing, like speech, may have an accent

  11. Grades • Grading on grammatical accuracy “punish[es] students for what they don’t bring with them”(Matsuda, 2012, p.155). • Is it fair to grade something you don’t teach? • “Grammar grading can discourage grammar learning by encouraging avoidance strategies...” (Matsuda)

  12. Grammar & Grades, ctd. • Matusda (2012) suggests “put[ting] grammar learning into the category of incidental learning––to facilitate learning and reward success...” (p. 155) • “To facilitate learning, writing teachers need to continue to provide grammar feedback for second language writers along with metalinguistic commentary.” (Matsuda, p.155)

  13. Vocabulary • teaching key academic and field/discourse-specific words is not remedial... • it’s foundational • Folse (2008) contends that if you believe better vocabulary will improve student writing, then teaching it is part of your job

  14. Plagiarism • is often NOT malicious or devious • can happen because students do not understand the fundamental reasons why we cite • The cultural values that animate source attribution in academic discourse are neither universal nor obvious to people encountering them for the first time

  15. “I was born here” • Answer I received when I once asked a student what other language she spoke • Many students have felt stigmatized by the labels ESL/ELL (Ortmeier-Hooper, 2008)

  16. Please Empathize • Don’t rub students’ noses in less than “perfect” grammar… • (e.g. don’t say things like “your English is broken”)

  17. Refs & Resources • always happy to share, consult, research • kelvin3@uw.edu • x24724

More Related