ater lessons are multilingual and focus at the same time on reading for meaning and learning a target language. For most learners, the target language is English. Learners listen to sentences in one language and must reproduce a translation textually. The app currently incl

The initial focus is on the learner’s home language (it’s currently being piloted with grade 3 isiZulu-speaking learners at a school in Soweto, Johannesburg). English is introduced gradually as a target language. The language and speech technology has been developed to provide linguistic accuracy and is grounded in teaching principles.

The Mzanzi kids multilingual language learning App was created for children between the ages of 2-6 years in South Africa. It was designed to stimulate visual, speech and language literacy skills at an early age by understanding basic everyday concepts and highlighting the correct pronunciation of speech in six (6) different languages; English, Afrikaans, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Sepedi and Setswana. The integration of images and phonetics provides a good foundation for children to learn and speak in their mother tongue or home language with confidence and fluency, but most importantly comprehend and appreciate the diversity of languages used by South Africans. This multilingual App provides a good introduction before entering a schooling environment, and offers a non-threatening, playful and fun way of learning languages using innovative technology.

Explaining the purpose of the activities

correspondence to the instructor and to other students, what technology should be used to communicate, and what kinds of questions might be asked (and how frequently). Similarly, multilingual students may have different cultural con-ventions governing their understanding of such issues as plagiarism

Preparing Faculty to Work with Multilingual Writers

course assignments should avoid relying on specific cultural knowledge to complete the assignment

f a student has difficulty understanding written instructions, oral and/or video in-struction might provide more clarity.

should think broadly about the kinds of technolo-gies they might allow students to use in an OWC

links to videos or online help guides

A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for OWI (CCCC OWI Committee, 2013) provided a starting point from specific OWI principles by helping to raise questions particular to multilingual writers

teachers should provide explicit expectations and instructions for how to par-ticipate in particular parts of the OWC

onsider the kinds of technologies their students might already be familiar with, or they can leave open the technologies students can use to accomplish various writing tasks (if appropriate) to draw upon students’ current literacy practices.

“the process of acquiring syntactic and lexical competence” in a language does not happen in a semester or in a year

The contextual cues that instructors might rely on to detect specific linguistic needs in an onsite classroom are sometimes absent in an online en-vironment, although other cues might be present.

multilingual to refer to students who might speak a language other than English as their first language, speak multiple lan-guages fluently, or perhaps speak multiple dialects of English

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