International students face a number of challenges when studying at a western university. However, instructors face challenges when teaching international students, too. It is important to understand instructors’ ideologies regarding how they view international students (as deficit or benefit, as ESL students or college students, as natives or non-natives, etc.) because this can inform how they (un)successfully address challenges students present in the classroom. One particular area where many of these challenges appear is in writing. Therefore, Marshall and Walsh Marr* (2018) investigated faculty perceptions of teaching multilingual students in writing-intensive classrooms. They found that most instructors view students in binary terms, which may negatively influence the pedagogical methods they employ in classrooms where typical binary categorizations are often blurred.

The Study

The study was a small-scale interview-based study of eight faculty members in arts, sciences, and business at a Canadian university in Vancouver, which is an extremely ethnically and linguistically diverse city. With such large multilingual and international populations, university classrooms are likely to have a high number of students who speak English as a first, second, or additional language. This fact was considered important in understanding instructor perceptions of teaching, as they would have to teach in very diverse settings, and, it was theorized, may see students in simplistic terms rather than in terms of the complex social, ethnic, and linguistic worlds they navigate – what the authors referred to as a “blurred continuum”.

The Context

The courses taught by these instructors were part of the university’s Writing Intensive (WI) curriculum, in which students take discipline-specific content courses, at lower and upper division levels, where writing is a primary tool for learning and assessment. The authors describe the WI curriculum as one that tries to balance writing to learn and learning to write pedagogies. Writing to learn is an approach that consists of both low and high stakes writing used to explore and think about content. Learning to write is a more explicit, genre-based approach to learning how to write. Depending on a number of factors, WI courses can be anywhere along the writing to learn-learning to write continuum.

The Findings

There were a few major findings from this study.

Multilingualism, very complex topic (especially in Vancouver) that defies most binary conceptualizations, was most often seen in simplistic, biinary L1/L2 terms by the participants. The issue here is that by not understanding the complexities of multilingualism, seeing students in either/or terms (e.g. native/non-native, Canadian/International, or even ideal learner/not ideal learner) can be associated with a deficit view of international students. The interviews highlighted that this can lead to seeing these students as a burden rather than an asset during group work, or focusing on certain grammar issues that would have otherwise been ignored if they had been made by a domestic student.

Another major finding from the study was how professional identities of WI instructors are perceived. Most (all but two) of the interviewees saw themselves exclusively as teachers of content, not writing, and certainly not ESL teachers. To many interviewees, academic writing is something learned through “osmosis”, incidentally through reading and practice, not teaching. They saw their job as transmitting a specific knowledge set, and writing was not part of this knowledge. This is likely because most of those interviewees never received any training in working with multilingual writers.

Questions and Implications

A number of questions arose in this article, some of them put to interviewees while others arising from analysis of the interviews. Some of the more poignant questions include:

• Should [instructors] make a special effort to help specific EAL students in a class?
• In a class made up mostly of EAL learners needing additional help, should instructors change the curriculum to meet the needs of this group at the expense of other groups?
• Does adjusting teaching and learning…always entail helping one group at the expense of others?
• If instructors do change their teaching to facilitate the learning of EAL students, do they run the risk of reducing the focus on
  disciplinary content?
• [Is] WIL [Writing Intensive Language] pedagogy…compatible with non-idealized learners who may struggle to learn through writing?

While there are no definitive answers to these, the article does offer a few practical suggestions that address some of these issues.

• A general approach to writing development would be to allow exchange of what students already know, perhaps during student-to-student dialogues. This gives students multiple opportunities to encounter and use new content and unfamiliar language while not “helping certain groups at the expense of others” (a persistent fear of instructors).
• Writing in WI classes should be multi-stage (i.e. multiple drafts) and the first priority should not be on language mechanics but content, organization, development, coherence, and critical thinking.
  • One caveat to this is that many WI courses have a strong content focus, leaving little time for writing development.
• The authors also suggest explicit training for instructors “to allow them to better bring together disciplinary content, writing, and understandings of the multilingual development of their students and the assets they bring to classes.”

Takeaway

Although the authors situated their findings within the context of a highly diverse Canadian college classroom, I do believe their findings can be generalized to other Anglophone university contexts. WI pedagogy, though it goes by different names, is commonly part of university curricula and is considered an effective and high-impact practice. I wonder if it is high-impact for those who are writing in an additional language, and if so, how the pedagogy adapts to a pluralingual classroom.

It’s clear from the interviews that instructors need more support. Without proper training on how to work with diverse writers, these instructors are likely to default to viewing challenges dichotomously, perpetuating their underlying ideologies and severely limiting their ability to help. Training of this sort requires time and money, though. The authors offer some sage advice here: “Support for faculty and students requires a large investment in time and money; differential tuition fees that charge international students more, therefore, put the onus [on] universities and colleges to step up to the challenge.”

References

Marshall, S., & Walsh Marr, J. (2018). Teaching multilingual learners in Canadian writing-intensive classrooms: Pedagogy, binaries, and conflicting identities. Journal of Second Language Writing, 40, 32-43.

*Note: I wish to thank Jennifer Walsh Marr for taking the time to preview this article before publication.