Multilingual Academic Writing - Course Description - Transfer from a Bridge Course

Oct 15, 2026

Course Description for a 12-week bridge course, “Multilingual Academic Writing,” designed for multilingual high-school students transitioning to college-level writing. The design responds to research calling for examination of learning transfer across ESL writing settings and extends scholarship on co-requisite writing, knowledge transfer, multilingual writing, and academic writing. Instruction centers on genre knowledge, audience awareness, and metacognition, fostering writing dispositions such as exploration and collaboration through varied OER-based writing activities and reflective evaluation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages11

Reading Time28 min

AccessFree to download

Course Description

Institutional Context

Theoretical Rationale

Multilingual Academic Writing: Transfer from a Bridge Course Omar Yacoub Course Description Multilingual Academic Writing is a bridge course designed to prepare multilingual high school students, enrolled in a boarding school, to transition into college writing. The course design outlined here responds to a call by Mark Andrew James to “examine transfer of learning outcomes in a variety of ESL writing instruction settings” (“‘Far’ Transfer” 80) . It also extends existing scholarship in the journal of Composition Studies on co-requisite writing (Christie & Gaillet; Heaser & Thoune), knowledge transfer (Fishman & Reiff; Sánchez et al.; Shepherd et al.); multilingual writing (Leonard et al.); and academic writing (Beck; Mallette) . The course design outlined here focuses on genre knowledge, audience awareness, and metacognition and on cultivating key writing dispositions, such as exploration and collaboration, for successful writing development and transfer. Multilingual Academic Writing is a 12-week course that targets two major outcomes: (1) develop students’ academic writing skills, and (2) prepare students for college writing. Using open educational resources (OER) and a variety of writing activities and assignments, students practice writing multiple genres, address different audiences, and metacognitively reflect on and evaluate their composing practices. Moreover, students can start building their writerly identities as they embark on writing experiences such as community-based writing and exploratory research writing assignments. These aspects of the course help students develop their writing and transfer writing knowledge to other contexts. I taught this course for transfer purposes to align with students’ needs, my goals as an instructor, the school’s mission, and the nature of bridge courses (McCurrie) . Despite the fact that this is a bridge course design, elements of it may also apply to teaching first-year composition (FYC), which is another context that aims to help students carry on the transition into college writing. Institutional Context My teaching of this course took place in 2019 in a summer high-school-tocollege bridge program for multilingual students at a private boarding highschool in a suburban area on the US east coast. The school’s mission for this program is to prepare high school students socially and academically for college life. The school enrolled 190 students from 15 states and 23 countries. Upon matriculating, all students passed a language proficiency exam that inComposition Studies 51.1 (2023): 124–134 cluded a writing section. The 21 students enrolled in this course—13 from China, 5 from Brazil, and 3 from Kuwait—can be split into two groups. The first group consisted of 14 students who had already planned and arranged to study at US universities; the second group consisted of 7 students who planned to study at universities in their home countries. Of the 21 total students in the course, 16 students were admitted to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs, and 5 were admitted to programs in humanities and social sciences. Given the school’s mission—in addition to students’ needs to transition into college writing—I felt an obligation to design and teach this course for transfer purposes. Theoretical Rationale Studies investigating students’ learning transfer across contexts started over a century ago (Woodworth and Thorndike) and the late 1900s were replete with additional studies (Perkins and Salmon); yet the field of composition studies did not take up a serious interest in writing transfer until 2007 (McCarthy; Beaufort “College Writing”; Nelms and Dively) . When scholars started exploring students’ transfer of writing knowledge, they began with FYC courses as a liminal space (Purdy & Walker; Rothschild) for university writing ( College Writing; Wardle “Understanding ‘Transfer’” & “Mutt genres”; Fraizer) . After more than a decade of concentr

FAQs

What are the two main outcomes targeted by the 12-week course?

The course targets (1) development of students’ academic writing skills and (2) preparation for college writing.

How does the course use activities and assignments to support transfer?

Students practice writing multiple genres for different audiences using open educational resources and then metacognitively reflect on and evaluate their composing practices to build transferable writing knowledge.

Why is research on transfer from first-year composition (FYC) used to design this bridge course?

Because the bridge course shares a mission with FYC—introducing and preparing students for college writing—and a gap exists in research about writing transfer specifically in bridge courses.

Oct 15, 2026

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