“HOW
DO I RESPOND?”: AN EXAMINATION OF
SECOND
LANGUAGE WRITING TEACHER CANDIDATES’
RESPONSES
TO MULTILINGUAL STUDENT WRITERS
Dr. Cate Crosby, Faculty
TESOL&
Applied Linguistics Program
Teachers
College, Columbia University
Because of the diverse linguistic
and educational backgrounds multilingual writers bring to the writing process,
second language writing (SLW) teachers are presented with unique writing
challenges to address in the classroom. Moreover, the experience SLW instructors
have with providing feedback to multilingual writers often addresses local
errors in writing rather than global. Finally, because writing feedback is one
of the most common ways to instruct multilingual writers on how to improve
their writing, there is the need for it to be comprehensible. However, it is
often the case that this is not so (Stern & Solomon, 2006). This brown bag
presents the results of a study of ten SLW teacher candidates’ responses to
U.S.-educated multilingual writers that was carried out in a first year writing
course for the purpose of learning about writing errors and providing feedback.
Results show the teacher candidates developed a strong sense of the
multilingual writers’ academic literacy needs and greater confidence in responding
to global and local writing issues.
Link to the Brown Bag Presentation - Spring 2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cq-Y97PpUc
