Approximately eight percent of Boise State students identify themselves as nonnative speakers of English, including children of Spanish-speaking farm-workers, international students on student visas, and refugees from such countries as Somalia, Bosnia, Uzbekistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Boise State has a number of innovative programs designed to support these multilingual learners of English both within the First-Year Writing Program and across the curriculum. These include free one-on-one tutoring, cross-cultural sections of first-year writing (integrated sections with native and nonnative English speakers in relatively balanced numbers), and lots of faculty development opportunities.

One such opportunity is a pilot program that allows a small group of faculty at all ranks and in all disciplines to work together over the course of a year to discuss and implement new teaching practices, including creating linguistically and culturally inclusive pedagogies or implementing innovative assessment practices. See the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Boise State Teaching Scholars Program.

Graduate students in the Rhetoric and Composition emphasis have the opportunity to develop multilingual perspectives on composition pedagogy and theory through various means, including but not limited to the following:

• the Teaching Scholars program, described above,
• part-time work as English language tutors,
• ESL-specific elective courses (e.g., Issues in Second Language Writing),
• class discussions and readings in various rhetoric and composition courses,
• attendance at a biannual public conference presented by multilingual first-year writing students,
• MA thesis topics related to multilingual rhetorics, second-language writing/writers, etc.,
• faculty development workshops,
• and individualized consultations with the Coordinator of English Language Support Programs.

Graduate students who have successfully completed the TA seminar are also invited to apply to teach the cross-cultural English 101 or 102 sections as part of their teaching assistantships. Applicants will be evaluated on the basis of their course evaluations, classroom observations (by the Director or Associate Director of the First-Year Writing Program), and an interview by the Coordinator of English Language Support Programs.