While serving as the writing program’s ESL and placement coordinator, Minoo Varzegar wondered just how linguistically diverse the student population was on the campus. So she designed a questionnaire to understand the nature of students enrolled in the program’s courses. The survey, completed by 848 writing students, revealed that 72 percent were multilingual – 136 nationalities; they represented 50 languages. Among the most common: Spanish, Gujarati, Arabic, Tagalog, Urdu, Polish, Portuguese, Hindi, Punjabi, Chinese, and Korean.
“Having taught in the writing program and analyzed my students’ writing errors, I had hypothesized that many of the students were multilingual learners and needed special treatment,” Varzegar said. “My research supported my initial thoughts; however, I did not expect such a high percentage of MLL [ESL and Generation 1.5] students.”
Multilingual students – including students who might speak English fluently, but speak another language at home – typically have problems with writing, Varzegar said. “Cultural literacy, grammar usage, and thought patterns of multilingual students are vastly different from those of native speakers of English.”
Armed with the results of the linguistic diversity project, Varzegar and her colleagues began to create a plan they thought could help nearly three-quarters of the student body flourish. The idea was to develop programs and policies that would help multilingual students achieve the same success as their native speaking counterparts.
In spring 2007, a proposal based on Varzegar’s research was presented to the New Jersey Commission of Higher Education, resulting in an Education of Language Minority Students (ELMS) Grant for the writing program, which comes with $170,000 for 2007–2009. The grant will allow research to continue and new programs to be developed to help multilingual students mainstream smoothly and effectively into academic courses.
Among the project goals is to make Rutgers–Newark faculty aware of the special needs multilingual students have and to tailor materials to those needs. Jonathan Hall, interim director of the writing program during the study (Elizabeth Mitchell now is acting director of the writing program.), said the grant would give the faculty involved the time and resources to tackle all the issues associated with multilingual students. “How do we teach them?” Hall said. “Do we teach them differently? What are we are doing now that is good for this population?”
Varzegar, now director of Rutgers–Newark’s Program in American Language Studies/ESL, has proposed programs that would place multilingual students in the right courses, minimizing their errors when writing, and making sure they thrive in regular courses.
Hall, who continues to teach in the writing program, said that there are plans to offer summer professional development seminars to Rutgers faculty, faculty from community colleges and four-year institutions, and even high school instructors. “It is not possible to say, ‘Let’s leave the teaching to ESL sections,’” Hall said. “It is important that we train our instructors so that they have tools they can use. It is every instructor’s responsibility to train him or herself.”
Collaborating on the ELMS grant with Varzegar and Hall were: Patricia Bender, director of the Rutgers–Newark Writing Center; Mary Moya, former director of the Program in American Language Studies (now retired); Nela Navarro, Writing Across the Curriculum coordinator; and Tom Lapointe, faculty, writing program.
