Inclusive Practices for Multilingual Writers
How you read, respond to, and support student writing depends on what you assume about linguistic difference. This elective brings those assumptions into view and offers frameworks for reading multilingual writing as evidence of what students know and do. Plan on 3 to 4 hours: about 2 on the activities and the builder, the rest reading.
What this elective asks you to do
- Read multilingual student writing for its rhetorical strengths before its surface features. (Activity 1)
- Distinguish asset-based from deficit-based readings of the same passage. (Activity 1, excerpt 2)
- Plan discipline-specific support for multilingual writers in one course. (Activity 2)
- Write a substantive response to an L2 draft from an asset-based orientation. (Activity 3)
Asset-Based and Deficit-Based Orientations
The first choice in multilingual writing pedagogy concerns what you believe a text shows. Before you decide how to respond to a multilingual writer, you have already decided, usually without noticing, what that writer's text represents. Is linguistic difference a problem to correct, or a resource to understand?
Linguistic Difference as Resource
- Multilingual writers bring rhetorical repertoires that monolingual writers lack
- Non-standard features are often intentional or systematic
- Transfer from other languages shapes argument structure, evidence use, and sense of audience in ways readers in the discipline recognize
- Students' home languages and dialects are legitimate intellectual and rhetorical resources
- Instruction adds registers to the student's repertoire and keeps the ones already there
- Instructor response attends to meaning, argument, and rhetorical purpose
Linguistic Difference as Problem
- Non-standard features are errors to be marked and corrected
- The goal is conformity to dominant academic register
- Surface-level features are treated as primary concerns, regardless of content
- Students' prior linguistic knowledge is treated as interference
- Writing instruction aims to eliminate features
- Instructor response puts correctness ahead of communication
The deficit framework also works against learning. Research on error correction in second-language writing (Ferris; Truscott, discussed below) questions whether correcting surface features without attention to meaning improves writing. Correction of that kind pulls student attention away from argument and toward surface compliance. The asset-based framework still addresses surface features. It ranks them below the rhetorical and intellectual work of the text.
An asset-based instructor reads a multilingual student's text and asks first: What is the argument? What evidence does the writer use? How does the writer understand the audience? After answering these questions, the instructor turns to surface features, and then only to those that block communication. Features that differ from dominant conventions while staying clear are left alone.
Code-Switching and Code-Meshing
The terms "code-switching" and "code-meshing" name different theories of how multilingual writers relate to their linguistic repertoires, and they imply different pedagogical programs.
Separation of Codes
This view holds that linguistic codes (home language, academic English, disciplinary register) belong apart, and that students must learn to "switch" between them as context requires. Academic writing calls for academic English. Home language and dialect belong to other settings.
Integration of Codes
This view, associated with scholars including Young and Canagarajah, holds that writers draw on several linguistic codes at once, and legitimately so. On this account, the separation code-switching demands is artificial, performative, and often impossible to sustain. Code-meshing treats multilingual repertoires as resources for composing.
The debate between code-switching and code-meshing remains open. You do not need to adopt one position whole. Awareness of both matters most. An instructor who has never considered code-meshing is more likely to mark legitimate rhetorical choices as errors and to read linguistic difference as deficiency.
The Minimal Marking Principle
Research on error correction in L2 writing (Ferris; Truscott) raises a troubling possibility. Correcting every surface error in student writing might not improve writing over time. Truscott argues it does harm, by turning student attention from content to compliance.
Under minimal marking, instructors identify and respond to patterns of error and leave individual instances unmarked. If a student regularly confuses the definite and indefinite article, marking every instance does not teach the rule. It produces a paper covered in marks, which discourages the student and wastes your time.
Identify the pattern, name it, explain it once with an example, and ask the student to find and revise the other instances. Error correction becomes active learning. The student does the work of recognizing and revising, and you supply the explanation.
Minimal marking also separates errors that block communication from features that differ from convention. When you read an L2 text, ask: does this feature keep me from understanding what the writer means? If it does not, it might need no correction at all. This holds especially in early drafts, where attention to argument and structure pays off more than surface editing.
The principle applies most directly to formative feedback. Summative assessment (a final grade) involves other considerations, and disciplinary conventions matter for students preparing to write professionally in a field. In drafting, comprehensive error marking is rarely the best instructional choice for any writer, multilingual or monolingual.
Reading Student Writing Through an L2 Lens
Read each excerpt below and respond to the questions. The goal is practice in asset-based reading: identify what the writer does well rhetorically before you turn to surface features.
What a complete response does
- Names rhetorical strengths in each excerpt before surface features.
- Separates patterns from isolated instances.
- Orders feedback by what matters most to the writer’s argument.
- Contrasts an asset-based and a deficit-based reading of excerpt 2.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the elective.
Discipline-Specific Support Plan for Multilingual Writers
Design support for multilingual writers in a course you teach or plan to teach. The plan should take an asset-based orientation and apply minimal marking to your feedback.
A private document for your own reference
What a complete response does
- Names the course genres and the conventions least familiar to newcomers.
- Lists three or four asset-based practices.
- Describes how you will handle surface error with minimal marking.
- Includes a student-facing statement of 200 to 300 words.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the elective.
NC State Campus Resources for Multilingual Writers
- NC State Academic Success Center, writing and research resources, with links to writing and speaking tutoring
- NC State University Libraries, research support including multilingual research services and subject librarian consultations
- Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity, equity-related resources and support
- NC State Global Engagement, resources for international students
A statement for multilingual writers in your course
Draft a 200–300 word statement for your syllabus or course introduction, addressed to multilingual writers. In language students will follow, describe your asset-based orientation, your feedback practices, and the resources available.
Writing a Substantive Response to an L2 Draft
Return to one of the three excerpts from Activity 1. Write to that student as if you were returning a draft, in the form you would use at the end of a paper or in a feedback document.
Take an asset-based orientation and apply minimal marking. Respond first to the intellectual and rhetorical work of the text. Address surface features only as the priorities you set in Activity 2 allow.
What a complete response does
- Responds first to the writer’s ideas.
- Addresses one surface pattern, with an example.
- Runs 250 to 400 words, addressed to the student.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the elective.
AI writing tools raise a particular concern for multilingual writers. When a student asks AI to "fix" or "improve" their prose, the tool often returns a standardized, unmarked academic register. That output erases the distinctive rhetorical features of the student's writing. The result is grammatically normative and rhetorically thin. An instructor who grades the AI-generated version approvingly, unaware of what was lost, tells the student that their own language falls short. An asset-based orientation includes explicit conversation with students about what AI editing does and does not do, and about whether "fixing" language improves writing.
The Writing WITH AI, Not FOR AI framework (Elective 3) applies directly here. Using AI to draft whole texts is a different practice from using AI as a reader or as a translator of specific terms. Help multilingual students tell these uses apart explicitly. Do not assume the distinction is obvious to them.
Build Your Multilingual Writers Artifact
Gather your main deliverables from this elective into one artifact for review: your discipline-specific support plan and your student-facing statement. The artifact goes into your Written Communication Instruction Certificate completion portfolio.
Where you will use this work
Four questions about this elective
Your answers here go to CWSP without your name or email, apart from your elective responses. CWSP reads them to revise the elective. They are optional, and they send when you submit.
When you have completed this elective, submit your responses to the C²TC record. Submission captures all saved fields.