Supporting Multilingual Learners

Eligibility

The TA Institute is open to undergraduate and graduate TAs, and all graduate students who are interested in teaching. This session is not open to staff, or faculty.

Event Description

This session introduces practical strategies for teaching in linguistically diverse classrooms. We will discuss common challenges that ESL and multilingual learners may encounter, such as navigating discipline-specific vocabulary, participating in discussions, interpreting assignment expectations, or understanding feedback, and explore ways TAs can scaffold learning to best support students.

Participants will learn approaches for designing clear communication, modeling academic language, supporting comprehension, and creating inclusive classrooms. We will also examine small but impactful teaching moves that can help multilingual learners succeed in tutorials, labs, online settings, and written assignments. In this session TAs will begin to build a toolkit to be prepared to support multilingual learners.