Qianqian Zhang-Wu

This chapter aims to facilitate readers’ understanding of the lived experiences of multilingual students by presenting our case studies of four students. The case studies were organized into two pairs (two Portuguese-English speaking students and two Cantonese-English speaking students) to capture the nuances in students’ self-identification of cultural and linguistic identities in relation to their previous language and educational backgrounds. This chapter highlights the importance of moving away from traditional institutional labels such as “ESL/ELL writers” and “international students” to rethink the complex linguistic identities of our multilingual student populations.

In Chapter 1, we discuss the shifting landscape of globalized higher education today, the implications of that shifting landscape on the teaching and assessment of multilingual writing, and the value of institutional self-study in research on multilingual writing. In this chapter, we clarify key concepts, such as multilingual students and superdiversity, and orient readers to key points in our book.

Rethinking Multilingual Writers in Higher Education: An Institutional Case Study explores the complexities of multilingual students as language users and learners, emphasizing the distinctive assets that they bring to their education and the ways in which institutions of higher education can better meet their needs. Teachers, university administrators, advisors, and other support staff will gain an understanding of the resources, challenges, and successes of this growing student population and become better equipped to provide them with the best possible educational opportunities. Through mixed-methods case studies focusing on the Northeastern University Writing Program and Writing Center, the authors unpack the complexity of multilingual students’ identities and languaging to challenge deficit and homogenizing narratives that overlook their linguistic assets and diverse educational experiences. Working within and against university categories for collecting information about students and assessing their writing, authors point out the limits of terms such as “international” and the problems with dichotomous L1/L2 and native/nonnative speaker labels. Finally, the book offers lessons learned about the importance of conducting program self-study to inform research and pedagogy for higher education institutions around the world. This book will appeal to writing studies and linguistics scholars with interests in multilingualism, assessment, and mobility, as well as institutional stakeholders and researchers of higher education and multicultural education.

In this chapter, we provide a background of Northeastern University, the structure of the Northeastern Writing Program and Writing Center, and describe the various self-study initiatives that our programs have taken over the last 15 years. In particular, we discuss efforts by the Writing Program Assessment Committee to gauge how well students are meeting specific Writing Program Learning Goals. We then discuss the Multilingual Writers Research Project, a multi-year, faculty-led focus of inquiry that has led to substantial curricular and pedagogical changes.

This chapter summarizes our findings, offers limitations of our study, and describes recommendations to improve the teaching, tutoring, and assessment of writing for undergraduate and graduate multilingual students. Specifically, we discuss how the research findings shed light on research, teaching, writing program administration and curriculum design, program self-assessment, writing center, and institutional stakeholders. We also offer specific recommendations for faculty and staff beyond Northeastern, as well as for administrators across various types of institutions.

In this chapter, we focus on multilingual students’ experiences at Northeastern’s Writing Center. We first put those experiences in the context of writing center literature on working with multilingual writers, a theoretical and intellectual framework that informs practices at the NU Writing Center and at other writing centers across and beyond the United States. We then offer the results of survey and qualitative interview research to investigate further the experiences of multilingual undergraduates and graduate students at the Writing Center, experiences that speak to the tensions in writing center practice between a focus on grammar or language-level concerns and a focus on larger issues, as well as the role of the writing center in students’ overall composing practices.

What we know about our students’ writing is often determined by what our colleges and universities value in the teaching of writing and by institutional data collection requirements. The goal of this chapter is to show how we have attempted to navigate institutional constraints on data collection while also providing opportunities to enrich our understanding of multilingual student writing. We report findings from three studies of students in the Northeastern University Writing Program: Program assessment results for writing outcomes, a survey of students in Advanced Writing in the Disciplines courses, and an analysis of combined outcomes and survey datasets. We illustrate how different kinds of frames for data analysis reveal quite different findings related to multilingual student writing.