Strong writing instruction for emerging billinguals is strong writing instruction for all students. Emerging bilinguals especially benefit from writing instructional strategies that are explicit and comprehensive in terms of building off of a student's home language, scaffolded, meaningful, and peer- centered. Continous feedback is also essential in modeling writing strategies for billingual students. On this page, we will dive into these strategies in depth. 

Some common and effective scaffolds for billingual students include things like: visual word walls, thematic word charts, and oral language first strategies. 

Visual Word Walls: Word Walls are wonderful for showcasing high- frequency and Tier 1 words for billingual students. As units and content changes, word walls can become more specific to content. They often use visuals and pictures to help stiumulate orthographic mapping for students. 

Thematic Word Charts: Word Charts are used for more specific, lower frequency vocabulary. They can be organzied by unit/ topic- and have a heavy emphasis on on images and translations for students. 

Oral Language First Strategies: These are strategies that have students discuss sentences or ideas before conceptualizing them through writing. This is done through partner talk, or oral sentence frames. This can also be done through story retelling through visuals. 

There is a common misconception among many educators that positive writing instruction for billingual students subtracts from positive writing instruction for mainstream school populations. This is absolutely not true. Positive teaching strategies serve all students, regardless of language abilities. 

A students first language (L1) can directly impact how they are able to write in their second language (L2). Cross language transfer occurs when patterns in vocabulary, grammar, spelling, punctutation, organization, and writing style from a student's L1 occur in a student's writing in L2. 

Positive Transfer: When a student's L1 transfers in an effective way to their L2. Students can apply what they already know, to write more effectively. 

Negative Transfer: When L1 rules do not apply to L2 rules. This can create added confusion- and creates the need for more explicit instruction when writing in the L2. 

Zero Transfer: Zero transfer occurs when features do not transfer at all, because they are non-existent in English. (For Example: English to Chinese.)