Tutoring Multilingual Students: Shattering the Myths

This is the author's accepted manuscript, made available 18 months after publication with the permission of the publisher.The increasing linguistic and cultural diversification of North America has resulted in large numbers of multilingual students attending college and university and seeking curricular and extracurricular support with reading and writing (Ruecker, 2011; Teranishi, C. Suárez-Orozco, & M. Suárez-Orozco, 2011). In the past, learning and writing centers hired “ESL specialists” to provide support. But this model, given the ubiquity of multilingual students in higher education today, is no longer sustainable. Instead, all tutors must learn the skills necessary to support the academic literacy development of these writers, and that means that the way tutors are trained must change. Because the lived reality of the majority of tutors (and center administrators) is monolingual (Bailey, 2012; Barron & Grimm, 2002), examining the myths generally held about multilingual students is essential to both our development as tutors and the development of our students as academic readers and writers of English. Only after raising critical awareness about these “misguided ideas” will training specific to tutoring multilingual students make sense and be put into practice (Gillespie & Lerner, 2008, p. 117). In this article, I present and challenge myths about multilingual writers and myths about how to tutor them

Evacuation a serious game for preparation

Mass evacuation is a measure to reduce possible loss of life in the case of potential disasters. Planning for mass evacuation is only useful if these plans are tested and evaluated by government and the public in reality or in simulated events. As a result, any prior experience is likely to be outdated by the next incident, because social structures, public perceptions, perception of decision makers, emergency planning and infrastructure all change over time and based on the previous experience. Especially in the Netherlands mass evacuation in the case of large-scale flooding is once-in-a-lifetime experience or less event because of the high protection level for flooding. The use of serious gaming is an alternative to gather required experience of conduction an evacuation in several events. This article describes the development of a serious game for mass evacuation, as well as experiences gathered from exercises using SPOEL. Finally is concluded that it is possible to evaluate emergency planning for evacuation and develop realistic experience through exercises using SPOEL, in an effort to compensate the gap in experience because of a lack of real life mass-evacuation experience

An experimental study of native speaker perceptions of non- native request modification in e-mails in English

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