Supporting international and multilingual students

I remember one of the first times a professor marked up my essay in colored ink, more vivid and profound than all the other times my professors had complimented my writing. I shoved my essay quickly in my folder, unable to bring myself to read the comments and stare at the question marks etched at the end of paragraphs. Not only was I embarrassed about my grade, I felt even worse about my own writing skills.

I had walked into my college-level English classes thinking the AP courses I had taken in high school had done more than enough to prepare me. I was a freshman being thrown into the world of academic writing, and academic writing was introduced to me with these words: “Forget everything you learned in high school.” As an English major, this sent me into a small panic. The academic writing typically taught to students in secondary education is structured and rigid, focusing on creating an argument while having the proposed argument be “solved” within five paragraphs. This 5-paragraph structure includes an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. While it may seem like a decent skeleton for students to work off when entering collegiate writing, this structure carries cultural implications because of the rigidity. For students whose first language is not English, the nuances of academic writing are not a reflex; as the director of the Writers Workshop, Carolyn Wisniewski, has said, “Academic English is no one’s first language.”

As a bilingual student, I have come across a mindset that I have found to be constant among second language (L2) students, international students, and first-generation college students: “I need to sound smarter.” This mindset stems from “literacy trauma,” which manifests “as the result of traumatic experiences—those that are negative and disruptive—surrounding writing, reading, literacy, and communication in formal educational settings” (Carvajal Regidor, 2023, p.10). For many students of color and L2 students, “sounding smart” is a notion that creates a negative correlation between a student’s own voice and any rhetorical situation they are meant to tackle—in their writing or otherwise. When working with students in the Writers Workshop, it is disheartening to hear this mindset as a main objective students want to work on during the session. When introduced to a student who is looking to “sound smarter” or had experienced literacy trauma, the Writers Workshop curriculum has prepared consultants to support students through their individual writing process.

The preliminary WRIT 300: Issues in Tutoring Writing class that undergraduates participate in before becoming consultants establishes how to approach a consultation with international and L2 students. The course includes articles by writing center and second-language writing scholars, like Dana Ferris (2009), Carol Severino (2009), Paul Matsuda and Michelle Cox (2009), Vershawn Ashanti Young (2010), Eun-Young Kim (2015), and Harry Denny, John Nordlof, and Lori Salem (2018). These sources provide grounding for consultants to move from locally viewing a student’s paper (grammar, language conventions, punctuation), to a more global focus on the paper (answering the prompt, sentence flow, etc.) to allow the student to improve larger aspects of the paper.

As a consultant, I have learned the importance of a student’s own voice and how they approach a session based on where they are in their writing process. Students’ language stretches beyond the form of daily communication—language is embedded in culture, identity, and the way in which a student expresses themselves. WRIT 300 was an opportunity to recognize the complex intersection of language and identity and even how we as consultants hold that complexity within ourselves as writers.

Many times, in the academic sphere, students seem to be presented with a very fixed and daunting introduction to higher level writing, a sentiment I, too, can relate to. Through finding my own voice as a L2 student who identifies as Latina, learning how to find my own voice in academic writing is a large feat I am still trying to overcome and persist. While any student is concentrated on comparing the tone of their writing and level of their writing to either their peers, professor’s expectations, or even sources they are analyzing, the pressure to sound anything like what they are surrounded by is insurmountable. As a Workshop, we aim to ensure these students are validated in their experiences, while pushing them to enjoy the ways in which they authentically write and move through their own process. Ferris (2009) points out, “even functional bilinguals will sometimes have ‘fossilized’ features in their writing and speaking that mark them as being non-native” (p. 27). While even students themselves see these “fossilized” speaking and writing conventions that need to be corrected through the assistance of something like the Writers Workshop, we as consultants are informed these conventions are anything but a weakness or something that needs to be “corrected.”

By Emma Ortega, English major, Sociology minor, senior