Teaching Multilingual Students Workshop Series

Summary

This short, practical session offers effective and applicable strategies for supporting your multilingual students with academic reading skills across disciplines.

Description

This 30-minute, online, synchronous session focusses on practical strategies for supporting your multilingual students with academic reading skills across disciplines. Beginning with a brief discussion on how academic reading differs from other types of reading, we tackle the expectations and challenges of academic reading for multilingual students before highlighting strategies, examples, resources, and next steps for ongoing support for both you and your students.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this session participants will be able to:

• Explain the challenges many multilingual students face with academic reading and how some of these challenges can be mitigated
• Apply one or two strategies to support multilingual learners with academic reading and expand their teaching repertoire
• Support multilingual students with appropriate institutional and external resources for academic reading skills to help them develop as efficient and competent readers in their discipline

Typically offered in October.

Summary

This short, practical session offers tips & strategies for designing clear, concise writing assignments across the disciplines.

Description

SFU student writers come from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds and languages, and all of them, regardless of background or first language, are apprenticing to the language of their disciplines. However, it is worth considering that some multilingual writers may approach writing assignments with different cultural, educational, and linguistic perspectives which may differ from instructor expectations. This 30-minute, online, synchronous session focusses on practical strategies for writing clear and concise assignments that are accessible for multilingual students across disciplines. We will model ways in which you can offer scaffolded support to students to help them clearly understand assignment expectations as they work towards successful completion of your assignments, and will share resources and potential next steps for ongoing support.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this session participants will be able to:

• Assess how familiar students are with expectations for writing assignments and revise those accordingly
• Reflect on the rhetorical norms of their discipline to help them create clear, transparent, and scaffolded writing assignments and associated grading rubrics with models that help multilingual learners find success 
• Advise multilingual students to seek appropriate institutional resources for disciplinary writing skills development

Summary

This practical session offers tips and strategies for giving effective feedback to multilingual students across the disciplines.

Description

Giving effective student feedback to improve learning is a valuable teaching skill. Multilingual students can use practical, guided feedback to check their understanding and improve their performance over time. This 30-minute, online, synchronous session focusses on practical tips and strategies for giving effective and efficient feedback to multilingual students across disciplines. We first reflect on why, how much and in what contexts we give feedback. Then we will discuss practical approaches and examples, to strengthen your skills in providing oral and written feedback that moves multilingual student learning forward, with purpose. We will end the session with time for Q & A, with a curated resource list and an invitation book a follow-up consultation with our team.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this session participants will be able to:

• Explain the purpose of effective feedback to multilingual students and how it differs from evaluation
• Select one to two strategies for giving effective feedback to multilingual students to support disciplinary learning and development  
• Offer support to multilingual students re: appropriate institutional and/or external resources to support their learning