Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to teach several sections of a first-year writing course for multilingual students. Having read the works of Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Suresh Canagarajah, Juan Guerra, Paul Kei Matsuda, and others, I built a curriculum that held linguistic diversity as the norm, creating numerous opportunities for linguistic negotiation and giving students the opportunity to play with format, style, language, and mode of reading and writing. For example, students read texts that directly confronted code-switching, code-meshing, and non-standard forms of English. Students analyzed hip-hop music (and the corresponding music videos) in multilingual groups,…
Author: Jennifer Eidum Zinchuk
Jennifer Eidum Zinchuk
Jennifer is currently a composition instructor at the University of Washington. She will complete her doctoral work this spring, focusing on the role students’ metacognitive practices and confidence play in writing success in college--especially for multilingual and non-traditional students.