Building Multilingual Learners’ Language Proficiency Through Writing

Multilingual learners don’t necessarily have to write long essays or research reports to improve their writing skills and to enhance language proficiency. In fact, opportunities to write shorter pieces are likely to be more motivating and improve their confidence as writers. These writing opportunities allow students to practice important writing skills, practice which is naturally differentiated since students work at their own level of English proficiency. The following are a few practical ideas for digital writing that can be used with face-to-face or remote learning. 

Blogging: Blogs offer a safe format for students to explore their voice as they create and share their blogs. Platforms like Fan.school offer students chances to interact, read, write, and give meaningful feedback to others. Some advantages of blogging include:

1. Students have a chance to share their voices with a larger audience than just the teacher. Knowing that someone will read their writing is a powerful motivator so publishing for peers—whether within the same class, school, or to an international pen pal—adds extra incentive for students to improve their writing skills. 
2. Students learn to provide feedback. Blogging can be used to teach students how to provide constructive feedback, and how to write for a specific audience. The teacher models constructive feedback by praising insights and requesting elaboration on specific ideas rather than focusing on conventions. For editing, which is an important part of the writing process, blogging platforms offer live editing sessions which can be used to point out mistakes and fix them in the moment. The power of digital publishing is that editing is easy, and young authors will start to care about getting it right when they know there's an actual audience.
3. It fosters enthusiasm for writing. Instead of asking everyone to answer the same question, or start their article the same way, teachers let students choose to write about something that is personal to them and may be more interesting to their peers: something that makes them feel angry, or motivated, or scared, or unique. Multilingual learners may or may not feel comfortable writing about their experiences as immigrants or multilingual learners, but it is their choice. Help them understand that they are writing for a reader—not the teacher. 

With content area topics, writing prompts in social studies, for example, that allow for individual expression might include:  

• What videos or movies taught you something cool about history? What did you learn?
• Who was the best leader in world history and why? What can we learn from them for our everyday lives? 
• How did (historical figure) handle mistakes every human makes and learn from them?  

Microblogging. As its name implies, microblogs are short entries (maximum of about 150 characters) like those used on Twitter. Students react to one another’s comments, pose questions, or challenge a point. Questioning and challenging are key aspects of critical thinking, and learning to accept other points of view or politely disagree are important aspects of effective communication. A microblogging tool such as Talkwall engages students in collective classroom interaction. After the teacher presents a topic or question, students typically have a collaborative discussion in groups, then post their messages individually to a shared ‘wall,’ or large classroom screen. Talkwall allows ‘browsing’ topics and the ability to reposition and edit posts. The use of hashtags and a short message format helps to promote the identification of key concepts. Student ideas are immediately visible to all members of the class, which enables students to engage with, and build upon, ideas from others beyond their own discussion group. The public display also allows teachers to give immediate feedback on students’ responses.

To extend the class-wide discussion, groups might take a topic from the hashtags and summarize salient points from the topic’s thread. Microblogging is particularly well suited to multilingual learners because they can participate fully when they may not yet be ready for extended writing assignments. When their group uses more complex grammar and academic language to summarize a thread, multilingual learners are exposed to higher levels of language use while being valuable, contributing members of the group. 

As with oral discussions, ground rules need to be established for productive digital interactions. Some rules include:

• Show respect to everyone in the group. Be mindful of body language, eye contact and tone of voice when discussing a post. If a peer mispronounces a word or uses incorrect grammar, they should try to make sense of the meaning, not call negative attention to the mistake.
• Disagree politely. If they are surprised by a comment, they may say so, but politely. “I see what you’re saying but I think…” Sentence frames are useful for providing students with ways to disagree politely and state their counterpoint. 
• Listen to everyone’s point of view and question others by asking “Why do you think that?”
• Build on each other’s ideas. “I agree with … and would add... .” or “I disagree with that point. My idea is… .” Students learn to explain their point of view by backing up their ideas with reasons or evidence.

Practice with adhering to ground rules not only facilitates productive classroom interaction, but it also prepares students to be responsible digital citizens.

Authoring Books:  Creating e-books allows students to express their ideas and understandings in ways that augment written expression. They may add photos, make text boxes, edit the text, and add voice recordings. The finished product includes writing coupled with other modes of expression. Book Creator is an app that can be used across content areas. The following example illustrates how Book Creator is applied to a first-grade math lesson. In this lesson, students are practicing strategies for addition and subtraction. Students, working in pairs, use the app on a tablet to take photos of different combinations of math manipulatives, e.g., 8 red tiles + 8 blue tiles = 16 (double the fact strategy). Partners import photos and create captions for each photo, including an equation. The process of creating an e-book facilitates discussion of the concepts among the students. 

To extend the activity, students may create word problems for other students to solve. For additional oral language practice, the teacher shows students how to use the voice recording option to narrate the process of solving equations. For multilingual learners, the recordings document progress in their English acquisition over time. The student-created e-books can be transferred into the iBooks app, which allows teachers to share student work with parents during conferences.

Tip: Make sure that the app or platform used has built-in security features. The teacher can set controls to preview all posts and comments before they are published. Student information such as names and posts can be kept private behind a password.