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28 % Teaching for Inclusion and Diversity [ 305 ]

to successfully complete the tasks and assignments. Here are three instructional

interventions that consistently help students with learning disabilities (and

other students as well) to improve their writing abilities, and thus feel more

relaxed and valued in the classroom.

1. Teach writing as a recursive practice. Show students that even the most

3. Provide frequent feedback based on the information explic itly taught.

One way to do this is to give students rubrics that outline the strategies and

components that you have identiﬁ ed as most impor tant in their drafts. Stu-

dents can use the rubrics as guides, and then you can use them to assess

their success with the writing task.

Providing Accessibility

In order to meet the needs of all students, course materials need to be available to

all students regardless of any physical or cognitive disability. Most campuses have

an ofﬁ ce of disability ser vices that can help you critique your course materials

with student accessibility in mind, but the ﬁ ve techniques listed below will help

you get started:

• Provide equivalent print text versions of all materials that are presented as

spoken or electronic components of the course.

• Encourage students to let you know if they have any kind of disability, and

then work with students throughout the term to ensure that they are get–

ting the support they need. Most universities have a disabilities ofﬁ ce to

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[ 306 ]

support students and teachers; many require documentation for granting

accommodations.

No matter which group of students you are working with, inclusive teaching

means that you let students know ahead of time what criteria you will be using to

evaluate their work. Part of teaching for inclusion is to make sure all students have

clear and meaningful information for the course. Creating courses where all stu–

Useful Readings

Alexander, Jonathan. Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Compo-

sition Studies. Utah State UP, 2008.

Bruggemann, Brenda Jo, et al. “Becoming Vis i ble: Lessons in Disability.” College

Composition and Communication, vol. 52, no. 3, Feb. 2001, pp. 368–98.

Corrigan, J. R. “Teaching Writing to Dyslexic Students: A Guide for the Composition

Gilyard, Keith, editor. Race, Rhe toric, and Composition. Heinemann- Boynton/Cook,

1999.

Jarratt, Susan C., and Lynne Worsham. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other

Words. MLA, 1998.

Kirsch, Gesa E., et al. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Bedford/

St. Martin’s, 2003.

Lewiecki- Wilson, Cynthia, and Brenda Jo Brueggemann, editors. Disability and the

Teaching of Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.

[ 307 ]

THIS CHAPTER OFFERS some brief suggestions for supporting multilingual

writers. It ﬁ rst describes the diversity of multilingual writers you may

encounter in your classroom by considering ﬁ ve groups of such students and then

provides some basic information about the nature of multilingualism. Next, it

examines four areas where multilingual writers often face challenges: understand–

Understanding Multilingual Writers

There are many kinds of bilingual and multilingual writers in American class–

rooms. Unless yours is a most unusual American composition classroom, you’ll dis-

cover that at least some of your students use one or more languages in addition to

International students and immigrants. Most obviously, your class may include

nonnative speakers of En glish who have received most or all of their education out–

side the United States in a language other than En glish. They will have studied

En glish as a foreign language abroad and/or as a second language in the United

States in an English– language program, often one designed to prepare them to do

academic work. This group includes two distinct subgroups: international students

and those who immigrated to the United States as adults. International stu-

twenty– nine

Teaching Multilingual Writers

Keith Walters

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[ 308 ]

for years), and may have interrupted educational histories. Both international stu–

dents and immigrants arriving in the United States as adults face par tic u lar chal–

lenges. Not only are they often continuing to master the En glish language, but they

in another culture but graduated from a US high school. Hence, university admin-

istrations do not distinguish members of this group from other gradu ates of US high

schools or GED holders. For some, En glish will be their primary or dominant lan–

guage, but for others, it will clearly be an additional language, one they continue

to work to master.

Speakers of colonial En glish. A third group includes those who are from countries

where En glish was the colonial language and where it plays a signiﬁ cant role at

the national level today— for instance, India, Ghana, Nigeria, and Singapore. In

some cases, they have received a great deal (if not most or all) of their formal

education in En glish, though their writing will show inﬂ uence from the nativ-

Students from bilingual communities in the United States. A fourth large group

are those who have been bilingual or multilingual all their lives, having grown up

in communities in this country where a language other than En glish is commonly

Deaf students. A ﬁ fth group would be Deaf students who use American Sign Lan-

guage (ASL) or some variety of Signed En glish and most likely work with an inter–

preter. ASL is a distinct language in its own right (it is not En glish syntax translated

into signs) and serves as the primary language for many Deaf Americans, espe-

cially those whose parents are Deaf, those educated in residential schools, and

29 % Teaching Multilingual Writers [ 309 ]

who uses ASL as a primary language, you should be able to get helpful information

from your school’s disability resource center and the student’s interpreter.

Individuals from these groups generally face par tic u lar challenges when master–

ing academic writing in an American college setting. Importantly, however, there

are distinct differences within subpopulations. While certain challenges faced by

a native speaker of Arabic who grew up and was educated in Saudi Arabia parallel

To complicate matters further, distinctions must be made among subgroups

of speakers within a language group. A speaker of Arabic from Saudi Arabia will

face dif fer ent challenges than, say, one from Tunisia because the Tunisian student

has studied French and likely En glish from an early age and has thus been exposed

to French and En glish rhetorical patterns. Further, Tunisians’ attitudes toward

mastering other languages generally differ from those of Saudi Arabians, who tra-

ditionally begin studying En glish as a foreign language in secondary school and fre-

quently are not highly motivated to master other languages in the way Tunisians

generally are. Tunisians are much more likely to take the native speaker as a model

whereas Saudis often do not because, from their perspective, doing so might com-

If you have the ability to use another language to any degree, you will appre-

ciate some of the challenges your students who are multilingual writers face and

will bring your own experience to the task of teaching multilingual writers, and

even monolingual ones. Additionally, you may have done university– level academic

work in a language other than En glish and will bring insights from those experi–

ences as well to the task of teaching writing.

But unless you are a most unusual teacher of writing in the United States

you prob ably are not able to give a conference pre sen ta tion or write an academic

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[ 310 ]

becoming ﬂ uent in the spoken variety of a language or being able to read texts in

All these facts do not mean that you do not have anything to teach your stu–

dents: you clearly do. However, if you are not able to do academic work in a lan–

guage other than En glish, what you teach them will not be based on your own

increasingly globalized world where the majority of users of En glish are not native

speakers of the language, it is worth pausing to consider the privilege that being a

native speaker of En glish represents: we are not required to master other lan-

guages to become part of intellectual life in the globalized world.

Understanding the Nature of Multilingualism

Evidence from the US census tells us that more than one in ﬁ ve Americans report

speaking a language other than En glish at home. Yet Americans generally think

of the country as a monolingual one. In fact, most Americans likely assume that

bilingual or multilingual speakers can use their languages at the level of a UN

interpreter who, they assume, can operate effortlessly in several languages. The

real ity of bilingualism and multilingualism is more complex— even for UN

interpreters. As Carol Myers Scotton notes in Multiple Voices: An Introduction to

Here, let me offer the example of the most balanced multilingual I have

encountered. Currently a professional conference interpreter, she was born in

Tunisia to an American mother and a Tunisian father. She grew up speaking

Arabic, French, and En glish, and each of her languages was used as a medium of

instruction at vari ous points in her educational career. After graduating from high

school in Tunisia, she received an undergraduate degree in the United States and

29 % Teaching Multilingual Writers [ 311 ]

asymmetries: When her grand mothers were alive, she spoke only Tunisian Arabic

with her Tunisian grand mother and only En glish with her American grand mother.

Like all Muslims, she prays in Arabic. When discussing French philosophy, she’d be

Importantly, there isn’t necessarily any direct correlation between one’s abil-

ity to speak a language and to write well in that language— a fact that is true for

monolinguals as well as bilinguals. Even if En glish is the only language you are

comfortable using (and especially if you grew up in a community where the local

variety of En glish was stigmatized in any way), you can surely recall the challenges

you faced in learning to write the sort of academic prose expected and rewarded

in gradu ate school. Now imagine trying to do so in a language that you do not feel

is fully your own.

It’s also worth remembering that no one has mastery of all of En glish, includ-

ing native speakers: there are registers and vocabulary items that are unfamiliar

to each of us. You may have no prob lem understanding a scholarly article about

narratology if that is your area of expertise, but odds are you’d ﬁ nd an article about

to read the text unless they are concerned with the speciﬁ c details of the research.

In contrast, when readers trained in the humanities begin reading in the social

sciences, they frequently ignore the charts, seeking instead to understand what

the text says about the charts. These examples remind us that academic ﬂ uency

extends far beyond mastery of the linguistic code to include matters like strate-

gies for constructing texts and consuming them.

Positive and negative transfer. Not surprisingly, multilinguals’ knowledge of one

of their languages often inﬂ uences their per for mance in the other(s) in both posi-

tive and negative ways. Such inﬂ uence is generally referred to by theorists of sec-

ond language acquisition as positive and negative transfer. Positive transfer refers

to things a language learner gets for free. For example, with regard to vocabulary,

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[ 312 ]

Many of the challenges you will face as a writing teacher of multilingual

writers will result from matters of negative transfer, where writers assume that a

verb tense, idiomatic expression, or rhetorical strategy that is appropriate in their

other language(s) is appropriate in written academic En glish when it is not. Nega-

The writing of students whose only language is En glish will show evidence

of negative transfer as well. The source of that transfer, in some cases, will be their

native dialect or way of speaking, which differs from Standard En glish in some

way. For example: These kind of ideas are illogical in contrast to these kinds of ideas.

Helping Multilingual Writers

While every writer will have unique needs whether En glish is their native lan-

guage or not, multilingual writers tend to face certain challenges that you as an

instructor can anticipate and address. Here we’ll highlight challenges in four main

categories: understanding writing as a pro cess, mastering the rhetorical strategies

favored in American academic prose, overcoming surface errors, and appreciating

American understandings of intellectual property and plagiarism.

those educated abroad, may continue to strug gle with thinking of writing as a pro-

cess. They may ﬁ nd it strange that practices like writing multiple drafts and revis-

ing them are required. In such cases, you may see little difference between drafts,

sometimes no more than the correction of surface errors, until the student begins to

internalize the pro cess and its complex recursive nature. A way to help students

adopt this pro cess as their own is to design assignments in such a way that they will

have to go through the steps of invention and planning, drafting, revising, and

editing.

29 % Teaching Multilingual Writers [ 313 ]

should do. Difﬁ culties might arise with students who are from cultures where they

are expected to do exactly what a teacher tells them to do and are not encouraged

to be creative or critical in the sense of being analytic, or to take initiative in ways

engaged in, even if we approach our task critically and encourage our students to

think critically about their own educations.) Consequently, simply explaining

that writing is a pro cess will likely not be sufﬁ cient. Finding ways to model that

process— whether in terms of how assignments are structured or revising a sen-

tence, paragraph, or essay with a student during a conference— may help students

begin to see writing in this new way.

Mastering rhetorical strategies for American academic writing. Rhetorical strat–

egies include every thing from genres— the five- paragraph essay, the research

paper—to structuring arguments to adducing evidence. A major challenge for bilin–

At the most abstract level, we often hear the mantra, “Tell ’em what you’re

going to tell ’em, tell ’em, and tell ’em what you told ’em.” Even so literal a descrip-

tion is not especially helpful cross– linguistically and cross– culturally. Writers

from other rhetorical traditions may feel a need to write introductions that seem

long and even baroque to Americans, beginning at far too general a level for Amer–

ican expectations. In short, their prototypes for how much information is needed

cated in Spanish- speaking countries often feel a need to provide more information

in an introduction than would be expected by Americans readers, who might label

such prose ﬂ orid. Introductions might be a challenge for many multilingual

writers, and you may often ﬁ nd yourself asking a student to revise by starting at

the beginning of the second paragraph or even the second or third page of a draft.

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[ 314 ]

It’s also impor tant to appreciate that in some rhetorical traditions, the best

writers would never explic itly tell readers their point— and certainly not at the

beginning of an essay. Rather, they might lead the reader to their conclusion or, in

many cases, only hint at it, assuming that the reader is smart enough to ﬁ gure it out.

As you teach writing to nonnative speakers, sooner or later you’ll have students

ask why Americans are so dumb. Why must they be told every thing? Aren’t they

smart enough to ﬁ gure some things out? In the rhetorical traditions into which

You will likely face similar challenges in helping students from some lin–

guistic and cultural backgrounds come to appreciate what Americans mean when

they talk about the “logical” or “linear progression of an argument.” In some pro-

found sense, writers in every language would claim their manner of argumenta–

tion is logical or linear. (As the French, following Rivarol, like to say, “That which is

not clear is not French,” though there are obvious distinctions between academic

Just as notions like clarity or logic vary across languages, so do concepts like

sentence and paragraph. While your students will surely know the translation

equivalents for all these terms, what comes to mind when they hear the word may

not be what you intend, but instead their understanding of the term in their own

educational context. Using speciﬁ c examples and analyzing them together can be

instructive in helping students come to understand what Americans mean when

The rule of the Conservatives was distinguished by its clearer and more principled

striving for the values of Western capitalism and by their adoption of a gradual, total

programme in order to separate the state and the society; and the start of the proj–

ect of gradual relinquishing by the state of the task of social care and the clearing of

the way in front of the movement of investment and capital by means of the reduc-

tion of taxes. And Thatcher set o from an unyielding philosophical- ideological con–

ception with which she fought the unions and broke their power; then she transferred

29 % Teaching Multilingual Writers [ 315 ]

citizens, and/so the result was that Britain in the eighties witnessed an economic

movement and a relative revival, and the inpouring of foreign capital, and the

conviction of the British voter came into being of the tangible, direct bene ts of

the rule of the Conservatives (Dickens etal., p.26).

Signiﬁ cantly, the original paragraph was a single sentence in Arabic with no

sentence- internal punctuation whatsoever. This situation is one that is in no way

unusual and that does not cause great challenges for readers of Arabic. At the same

time, it often comes as a quite a shock to Anglophones who have not studied Ara-

American readers generally report that the above text is very challenging

to read. Their complaint is not that any one sentence is difﬁ cult to understand.

Instead, they say they have trou ble creating a coherent text from the sentences

and the information contained in them; in short, they have trou ble making any

real sense of the text. Now, consider this recasting of the same text (the major

changes have been italicized):

The rule of the Conservatives was distinguished from that of its Labour pre de ces-

sors in three speci c ways. At the philosophical level, it adhered directly to the princi-

ples of Western capitalism. More practically, it adapted policies by which the state

gave up its prior role in providing a safety net for the less fortunate, thereby sepa-

rating the state from society in crucial ways. These policies were made pos si ble

The strategies used in recasting the earlier text are several. First, a number of

explicit metatextual markers are added (e.g., in three speciﬁ c ways, at the philosoph-

ical level, more practically). These markers scaffold the entire text, creating a macro-

structure for the text that readers ﬁ ll in as they read. In other words, they tell the

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power . . . , giving rise to . . . ) and subordination (which encouraged . . . ), rather than

the coordination found in the original translation, likewise signals both the rela-

tive importance of ideas and the logical connections between them.

In his book Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis,

Book, or Article, sociologist Harold Becker notes, “If we make every thought in the

sentence equally impor tant grammatically by stringing together coordinate

clauses, readers will think they are equally impor tant” (p. 82). Becker states what

An additional feature of this text that merits comment is the trope that

Barbara Johnstone has termed “pre sen ta tion as proof,” which she deﬁ nes as

“making . . . argumentative claims linguistically pres ent . . . by repeating them,

paraphrasing them, and clothing them in recurring structural cadences” (p. 47). To

an American reader, this trope can seem like piling up evidence, often of similar

kinds or at the same level of speciﬁ city, in an effort to make a point. A corollary

During a workshop I presented about these issues at Bethlehem University,

one of the participants, a professor of Arabic, commented, “When we read in Arabic,

we read the ﬁ rst version, but what we understand is the second version.” His com–

ment makes undeniably clear the fact that the expectations writers across lan-

This example from Arabic should help you appreciate some basic facts when

it comes to thinking about the challenges of multilingual writers. First, founda–

tional notions like those of the sentence and paragraph vary across languages.

Second, texts in other languages can be very dif fer ent from texts in En glish, and

the more dif fer ent the language and culture are from En glish and Anglophone

culture, the greater those difference are likely to be. Third, the expectations writers

can have of readers vary widely across cultures, whether in terms of how long an

29 % Teaching Multilingual Writers [ 317 ]

intrinsically better than others; ours are the products of the history of our lan–

guage, our culture, and our intellectual tradition, as are those of other languages.

Models are especially useful when helping students who are struggling

with such issues, and it is among the reasons Every one’s an Author includes both

examples of writing in vari ous genres and annotated examples of them so that

students can see how an actual text functions. Particularly since writing peda-

Overcoming surface errors. Many discussions of helping bilingual or multi-

lingual writers develop their skills begin with surface errors. I have chosen not to

do so because, in my experience, it is easy for a concern with surface errors to over–

take any concern with larger issues. This is true when teaching writing to native

speakers as well, but especially with multilingual writers, the larger issues are the

ones teachers of writing are most able to help with.

The task of helping students learn to analyze and correct their own surface

errors often pres ents quite a challenge for many writing instructors, who must be

able to explain how the En glish language works (e.g., why we use the pres ent per–

fect rather than the simple past in a speciﬁ c context). This challenge is exacerbated

past perfect, count noun, subjunctive mood, and nonrestrictive relative clause that

are meaningless to many native speakers who, nevertheless, can use the language

appropriately and effectively. Odds are you will need to add to the knowledge you

already have of the appropriate terminology for explaining some surface errors.

A good resource is The Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written En glish by

Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, and Geoffrey Leech.

With surface errors, quite often language learners’ errors become patterned

habits that are difﬁ cult to break. Among the most common of these are the failure

to use – s (e.g., she believes, it gives rise to) and the overuse or underuse of the articles

a, an, and the. The ﬁ rst case results from the fact that a single verb form— the third-

person singular pres ent– tense indicative— requires this sufﬁ x; confusingly, how–

ever, for the nonnative speaker of En glish, this sufﬁ x is not used with verb phrases

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[ 318 ]

linguistic point of view, there are often logical sources for such recurring errors, and

explaining both the nature of these errors and how they can be corrected requires

knowledge of grammatical terminology and understanding of how the En glish lan–

guage works. And even then, there are mysteries and exceptions for how native

speakers of En glish and other languages use deﬁ nite and indeﬁ nite articles.

A common strategy for helping students work on such prob lems is having

them keep an error log in which they note down the errors they make along with

explanations of them. Over time, as the list grows longer, students can use this list

when editing and proofreading their own work. Pedagogically, what will be most

helpful is to choose a small number— two or three—of error patterns per draft

Understanding intellectual property and plagiarism. Issues related to plagia-

rism and intellectual property are especially challenging for multilingual writers.

This should come as no surprise. First, even American- born monolinguals strug gle

with these issues, particularly in the era of the internet. Second, once we acknowl–

edge that dif fer ent cultures understand intellectual property and the aims of

education differently, it should follow that an understanding of what consti–

tutes plagiarism would vary widely across cultures. American academic notions

An especially useful resource is a plagiarism tutorial created by the University

Libraries at the University of Southern Mississippi, which includes short tests stu–

dents can take along the way to demonstrate that they understand the distinc-

tions being presented. (A link to the tutorial is included in the list of Useful

Readings below.) Despite the usefulness of this site, rather than merely assigning

it outside of class, you will likely want to incorporate discussions of the material it

As teachers, our goal is to help students add to the communicative resources they

already have— that is, to become more fully multilingual. To achieve this goal, we

must ﬁ nd ways to focus on what our students are already able to do instead of

concentrating uniquely on what they can’t yet do. We must also work to remem–

ber what they have achieved by this point in their educational careers.

29 % Teaching Multilingual Writers [ 319 ]

As you undertake teaching multilingual writers, I encourage you to spend

time reﬂ ecting on what they have to teach us, as teachers of writing, about our

craft— our understanding of texts, of how they are structured, and of how they

In 1988, while commenting on the fact that the Demo cratic National Con-

vention had had only two female keynote speakers in its 160- year history, the late

Texas governor Ann Richards observed, “But if you give us a chance, we can per–

form. After all, Ginger Rogers did every thing that Fred Astaire did. She just did it

backwards and in high heels.” In so doing, she reminded listeners how easy it is to

Useful Readings

Belcher, Diane, and Alan Hirvala, editors. Linking Literacies: Perspectives on L2

Reading– Writing Connections. U of Michigan P, 2001.

Biber, Douglas, et al. The Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written En glish.

Pearson Education, 2002.

Dickins, James, et al. Thinking Arabic Translation— A Course in Translation Method:

Arabic to En glish. Routledge, 2002.

Ferris, Dana, and John S. Hedgcock. Teaching ESL Composition: Purpose, Pro cess, and

Practice. 2nd ed., Erlbaum, 2005.

Matsuda, Paul Kei, et al. Second- Language Writing in the Composition Classroom:

A Critical Sourcebook. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.

Myers Scotton, Carol. Multiple Voices: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Blackwell, 2006.

Silva, Tony. “ Toward an Understanding of the Distinct Nature of L2 Writing: The ESL

Research and Its Implications.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 27, 1993, pp. 657–75.

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[ 320 ]

Silva, Tony, and Paul Kei Matsuda, editors. Landmark Essays on ESL Writing. Erlbaum,

2001.

[ 321 ]

YOU WANT TO HELP YOUR STUDENTS as much as you can because you want

them to succeed in your class— but you also need to get your own work

done and, you hope, cook an occasional meal and get some sleep. Ways to respond

helpfully to students’ work and still manage your own time are the subject of this

chapter.

Responding and Grading

First, remember that responding and grading are two dif fer ent activities. When

you respond to students’ writing, your goal is to help them improve their writing

of the draft at hand and in future writing; for that reason, you should respond in

greatest detail to drafts that will be revised. Grading, on the other hand, ranks the

writing’s overall quality in relation to standards you or your writing program has

Developing Criteria for Response

Since most students have been taking En glish in school for many years, they may

have some deﬁ nite ideas about what makes good writing. However, their ideas

may not match one another’s ideas or your criteria. So a good ﬁ rst step in prepar–

thirty

Responding to Student Writing

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[ 322 ]

Use rubrics and checklists. Checklists and rubrics or scoring guides are excellent

tools for responding to students’ work in pro gress. They spell out as clearly as

pos si ble your expectations and provide detailed responses to as few or as many

characteristics as you want students to be responsible for. Students can use them

Arguing a Position: Response Criteria

Author: __________________________ Assessor: __________________________

Very

well Well

Some-

what

Poorly

or not

at all

THE ASSIGNMENT

The essay presents an argument.

Required drafts and other related assignments are present.

THE RHETORICAL SITUATION

USE OF SOURCE MATERIAL

The essay includes adequate and appropriate source material.

Sources are introduced and identi ed appropriately.

Summaries and paraphrases are accurate and avoid plagiarism.

The Works Cited section is correctly formatted (MLA).

STYLE AND MECHANICS

Sentences are consistently correctly phrased and punctuated.

The language is precise, and the wording exact and accurate.

Grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling are correct.

30 % Responding to Student Writing [ 323 ]

You could substitute “well,” “acceptable,” “poor,” “not at all,” “early,” “ middle,”

or “late”— whatever method of response you choose. Having an even number of

response levels prevents grouping checks or credits in the middle. Why not use

numbers or letters? For one thing, students will expect you to tally them up to cre–

ate a precise grade for the whole rubric, increasing your workload. For another, the

Develop evaluation criteria collaboratively. Students understand and accept

evaluation criteria more readily when they participate in developing them. You’ll

ﬁ nd, too, that students know and can articulate standards very well; they know

what makes for good writing, even if they have trou ble achieving it. ( Here’s a use-

4. Once all groups’ lists are on the board, ask the class to ﬁ nd common crite-

ria. If, for instance, every group’s list contains “focused topic,” write that

term on a class list in the middle section. As students ﬁ nd common crite-

ria, they’ll note that groups use vari ous terms to describe some criteria.

Discuss pos si ble differences in the terms and help the class decide on a

single term that every one agrees will be used to mean one criterion. This

discussion will help students understand the criteria and develop a com–

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[ 324 ]

class criteria with generally accepted criteria from your school’s writing program

documents, your textbooks, and other sources. For example, share with students

three or four checklists or rubrics that deﬁ ne criteria for the kind of writing you’re

working on. (The WPA Outcomes Statement, reprinted in Ch. 3 of this Guide, is a good

starting point.) As out– of– class work or in groups, have students compare their class

Responding to Drafts

Don’t. Many writing teachers think that if students write something, they need

to respond in detail. That’s not true. If a student writes in a journal or does in- class

writing as part of class work, a check or date stamp to acknowledge that it’s done

may be all that’s needed. Much other informal writing may only require a brief

their assessment, which is often exactly right or even excessively harsh. Engaging in

a written dialogue with students over the merits of their drafts in which you can

afﬁ rm their evaluation rather than having to point out prob lems yourself can be very

positive— and even better is pointing out strengths they may have overlooked.

happened to me once, too” or “I’d like to know more about this”), questions (“How do

you know this?” or “Do others have the same opinion?”), and suggestions (“What if

you . . . ?” or “Consider moving this to . . .”).

Highlight strengths as well as weaknesses. Research suggests that we learn best

when criticism is balanced with praise— when our strengths as well as our errors

are pointed out. Frequently, however, praise for what students do well in writing