BEYOND BRIDGING THE GAP 1

Beyond Bridging the Gap

An Analysis of Multilingual Student Behaviors in Individual and Group Classwork

Zachariah Pippin

Auburn University at Montgomery

April 27, 2021

Introduction: The Building of Bridges

The notion has long been persistent in the cause of diversifying perspectives, in the

classroom and elsewhere, that the ideal supposition in terms of what we may do in order to

properly create an area which is both safe and comfortable for people who bring diverse

perspectives (especially marginalized perspectives) to the table can be summarized accurately

within a metaphor: “the building of bridges.”

It seems that the metaphor might stem from a sort of collective social consciousness, a

universal human experience that transcends culture. In the early days of human societies, when

disparate civilizations were first developing, those civilizations tended to demarcate their

territorial borders along natural border points: seas, mountain ranges, tree lines, and especially

rivers. The building of a bridge over the river is a broadly understood symbol of unity between

peoples, a symbolic vow of, at the very least, mutual tolerance and shared interest, if not a

significant move toward actual solidarity. In the same way that the building of a wall speaks

toward an ethos of isolation, the building of a bridge speaks toward an ethos of welcoming and

collaborative effort. It is an image that anyone can appreciate, and yet, I think that despite its

beauty and universality, when it is used to depict the best course of action for multilingual and

multicultural students in the college classroom, the bridge-building metaphor can present

problems that we do not necessarily anticipate.

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The building of bridges as a metaphor is too easy. It does not serve as an accurate way to

compartmentalize the methods that multilingual students can be seen to flourish in the classroom,

at least not in a way that conforms to my direct observations in the classroom. Rather, the

interactions between multilingual and monolingual students and (perhaps more importantly)

between multilingual students and other multilingual students both reveal systems much more

complex at play than a simple gap that needs to be bridged by the instructor, by members of the

socially advantaged group, or even by a collaborative effort between the monolingual and

multilingual student populations. It reveals distinct strategies of success that function to help

multilingual students succeed and certain practical pedagogical measures that can be

implemented in order to help multilingual students along that road, some of which may involve

the so-called “building of bridges” but some of which simply require a lighter hand be

administered that multilingual students might do as multilingual students will. In the following

pages, I will explain my observations, introduce relevant scholarship to the discussion, and

conclude with how the application of these observations might help us move beyond the building

of bridges into a more nuanced understanding of multilingual student behavior.

The Multilingual Classroom

For the purpose of this essay, I have observed multilingual and monolingual students in

the first-year college composition classroom in the performance of two distinct activities:

individualized analytical composition and group creative/argumentative composition. The

reactions that multilingual students had to different classroom activities was interesting, and

while the startling disparity between multilingual reaction to different pedagogical methods will

make up the bulk of this section, I do think that it is worth the note to take a look at the

difference between monolingual student behaviors prompted by participation in these activities

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so that we can more accurately gain an understanding of the differences between the behaviors of

multilingual students and their monolingual classmates.

The individual assignment given to the students was to begin working on an

analysis/evaluation style essay centered around an advertisement. Students were to form a

coherent thesis statement and begin work on the essay itself during the allotted class time. The

instructor would be available to help them if they were in need and would be making rounds to

check in on them and provide feedback as they worked.

The response of monolingual students to the difference in activities was fairly limited.

When working individually, most monolingual students did not address other students for help.

Some would occasionally speak to one another, but only very briefly and more for understanding

about which ideas may be appropriate for the assignment and which ones may not. These mutual

help interactions were the exception, rather than the rule. More commonly, the monolingual

students would field any questions they might have to the instructor, who would in turn answer

the questions for the entire class, presumably in the case that any other student might be dealing

with similar issues without voicing their concern.

During the same individual work, multilingual students, while they were just as engaged

as their monolingual classmates, expressed their engagement in a different way. Firstly, it is

worthy of note that two of the class’ multilingual students who were colingual with one another

(henceforth referred to as Students A and B) stayed very close together in seating arrangement.

The last one (Student C) sat at a table with two other students, both of whom were monolingual.

Students A and B sat together and talked before class in their shared language, rather than

English, and this language preference did not wane once class time began. Even as the individual

freewriting assignment began, the two colingual students continued to converse in their native
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language. I could not speak their language, but the longer I observed them, the more quickly it

became apparent to me that Student A understood more of English than did Student B, and the

former was helping the latter to understand the specifics of her assignment and the instructor’s

expectations.

Student B was the first to get an individual visit from the instructor, who wanted to check

her progress. She was taciturn and accepted the instructor’s critiques of her work (which were

given tactfully and constructively) without asking questions. Student A, sitting right next to

Student B was the next one to accept the instructor’s critique, and she, by contrast asked several

questions about the critique and about the project itself, which the instructor was happy to

answer. Student A’s subsequent efforts were clearly more guided with pauses to her workflow

growing more infrequent (with the exception of those pauses to assist Student B). After the

instructor moved on to a nearby monolingual student, Student A turned to Student B and began

moving to help her understand the instructor’s critique. Student A went over the information that

the instructor had conveyed to Student B while the instructor spoke to her, and one of the most

surprising things about this assignment was how much it appeared to improve Student B’s

productivity during the writing. Student B had been able to use the instructor’s critique without

Student A’s explanation, but it was clear to the observer that her productivity increased

dramatically after being given counsel by Student A. Student C appeared to understand English

as well as any native speaker, and she had no trouble accepting the instructor’s critique and

integrating it into her work. In all, each of them seemed to have made significant strides in their

work by the end of class and incorporated the instructor’s feedback into their projects for future

use. The most interesting of all these interactions, for our purposes, is the mutual aid between
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Students A and B, and this theme will continue to make itself evident as we move into the group

work assignment.

The group assignment was designed to help students more accurately grasp some of the

modes of rhetoric incorporated into advertising. The students were to create an advertisement

given only a product and a target demographic (e.g., advertising an energy drink to boys aged

13-18). To this end, students would search the Internet for advertisements for their group’s

product and advertisements for other products aimed at their groups target demographic. They

would incorporate rhetorical elements from the advertisements they found online into their own

advertisement, which would be drawn and presented to the rest of the class.

In contrast to their behavior during individual work, almost all monolingual students

were engaged socially with one another as a group, even at times when they were not focused on

the project at hand. When focus was on the project, the social element was a key determining

factor of individual students’ productivity. Rather than work being compartmentalized to

individuals, ideas were free-flowing between monolingual students, giving the entire project the

air of a brainstorming session, as they each attempted to inject ideas which could potentially win

the approval of the instructor and, perhaps as importantly, the group itself or make changes to an

already accepted idea in such a way that might constitute a concrete contribution to the project as

a whole.

During the group work assignment, seating order changed fairly little, with the two

colingual students sitting next to one another. Student C, however, had made a move to a nearby

table with two new monolingual students. The nature of the assignment caused each table to

group together, meaning Students A and B were with two other monolingual students in a group

of four, while Student C was grouped in with two monolingual students in a group of three.
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There seemed initially to be a barrier between the multilingual and monolingual students at both

tables. That is not to say that there appeared to be hostility or animosity between them, far from

it, there was, however, a certain level of distance between the distinct sides of the table. Over the

course of the class, that distance would ultimately evolve in two separate directions between the

table with Students A and B and the table with Student C.

At the table with Students A and B, the rift was apparent, especially for Student B.

However, Student A’s skill at communication (both in spoken English and in general nonverbal

communication) meant that both the multilingual and monolingual members of the group were

able to work productively with one another to form a cohesive whole. Initially, Students A and B

worked in a predominantly research related role. However, as time went on, Student B became

heavily involved in the design phase of the project, working on the visual design of the

advertisement, which exercised cross-cultural color symbols (e.g. green representing mildness

and red representing extremity). In this group, the barrier between multilingual and monolingual

students quickly dissolved, and all four students were working very well together by the end of

the class period when it was time for them to present their advertisements.

Despite starting out similarly, Student C’s group could not have ended more differently.

Student C also had a barrier between her and her monolingual group members. However, despite

her having a fairly strong command of the English language, likely on level with Student A, the

barrier between Student C and her group never fully deteriorated, throughout the course of the

class. The two monolingual students grouped up and worked on the project, while Student C sat

off to the side, her chair at an angle in an attempt to edge her way into the project. However, the

two monolingual students kept the exercise to themselves, and after several attempts to find
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some part of the project she could do, Student C walked off to the side and quietly began to work

independently on a different project.

What conclusions might be drawn from these observations? Firstly, that colingual

students will look after their own. If two students speak the same native language in their

classroom, those with a more solid understanding of and grounding in the English language will

help those with a lesser understanding. Secondly, we may learn that multilingual students can

achieve a tremendous boon to their work from having a colingual student in the classroom with

them. Lastly, we can assume that, while multilingual and monolingual students may initially

have a difficult time connecting with one another and working together, it is far from impossible

to create spaces where multilingual and monolingual students can form a cohesive group in the

classroom.

The Unconventional Role of Socialization

In “Teaching Multimodal and Digital Literacy in L2 Settings,” Heather Lotherington and

Jennifer Jenson list socialization as one of the key literacies in multidimensional communication.

Socialization is one of the key factors when going forward into multilingual learning. It only

makes sense if you think about it in the context of practicality. A multilingual student will be

getting a significant portion of their experience in English from their environment at school,

especially if they do not speak English in the home. As such, interactions with monolingual

English-speaking peers and instructors can be thought of as a boon if not a necessity to

establishing literacy in the English language for many multilingual students. Much ado ought be

and indeed has been made about the amount of English language literacy that a multilingual

student can pick up from socializing with monolingual, English-speaking peers, inside the

classroom, we know that multilingual students tend to be less talkative and less likely to provide
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criticism or feedback in oral response situations. Not only does my observation in the classroom

confirm this idea, but it’s quantifiably the case as demonstrated in Wei Zhu’s “Interaction and

feedback in mixed peer response groups.”

Zhu’s data state that students for whom a language is not native (“L2” students, per the

paper’s terminology) are less likely to participate in oral discussions when they are in groups

made of students speaking the language natively (“L1”). Interestingly, however, these students

were not less likely to participate contribute in writing, only in oral discussion. This result speaks

to one of two potential contributors to outcomes (or some combination of both). Either the

pressure which is causing multilingual students to contribute less in oral discussions is social, or

speaking a new language is quantifiably more difficult than writing it. I am more inclined to

believe the first option as the primary contributor, as the second is sure to vary from language to

language. A notable feature of Zhu’s methodology was that his mixed response groups

incorporated one multilingual (“L2”) student and multiple monolingual (“L1”) students.

As an addendum providing context to the way that classroom observation is used, it is

important to note that we need not treat all multilingual students as similar, certainly not as the

same. This fact having been stated, it is also pertinent to our discussion to identify and more

importantly to understand the implications that underly certain patterns of behavior that may

affect multilingual students adversely in the classroom. While it can certainly be dangerous to

use generalizations when dealing with any group of students in the classroom, a distinction ought

to be drawn between those generalizations that are backed up by observable data and those

which are backed primarily by harmful stereotypes. Of course, it goes without saying that even

when using helpful generalizations, we must take care to avoid those harmful stereotypes, but

applying observational data to the discussion can help us come up with a framework for teaching
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disadvantaged students in a way that can help level the playing field with their more advantaged

peers, provided we treat that framework as a framework and not as the end-all-be-all final word.

It may, of course, be changed and adapted to fit each individual student’s needs, which should

always supersede any theory.

With all those things having been said, the data that Zhu introduce to the conversation

here confirm the behavioral bottleneck that I have referred to in the description of my

observations as “the barrier.” Student C attempted to get past this barrier, to contribute to her

group in a productive way, but she found herself pushed outside of the group’s boundaries. By

contrast, Students A and B managed to get past the barrier without issue. Not only were they

working very well with their monolingual groupmates, but Student B was doing so with very

minimal verbal exchange. If we can figure out how and why this happened, it can help us to

understand the barrier better, and by extension, to remove that barrier that works so insidiously

to disadvantage multilingual students in their interactions with monolingual students in the

composition classroom.

It is also worth noting that the “barrier” to which I make reference is not the same thing

as the oft-invoked “language barrier.” The phrase “language barrier” is problematic for its

oversimplification, as the problem that it describes lacks nuance. The “language barrier”

demonstrates the following dilemma: “Person X speaks Language X, while Person Y speaks

Language Y, therefore these two individuals will have more difficulty communicating than will

two people with a common language.” While this phenomenon certainly exists, it is myopic to

focus on it exclusively. For one thing, a large percentage of conversation is nonverbal and thus

while it may be more difficult to express complex ideas without a common language, especially

in writing, it is far from impossible for a set of individuals determined to communicate with one
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another. Secondly (and more importantly), to refer to my “barrier” as merely and expression of

the traditional “language barrier” as outlined above neglects the systemic advantage of the

monolingual student over the multilingual student in the classroom, especially the language

classroom and the imbalanced group power dynamic created by that advantage. It is important

that we address the barrier wholistically rather than assuming that it is a mere function of ability

to communicate. Failing to do so not only makes us unable to address a complex problem but

also underestimates the communication abilities of our multilingual and monolingual students

alike.

So far, I expect that the notion of learning how to circumvent the barrier would be

relatively uncontroversial, and the prospective solution points toward the very same metaphor

that I decried at the beginning of this paper. To put it simply, I sound now as though I am asking

how we might “build a bridge over the river.” This is not, however, my intention, as the

“building of a bridge” becomes too a problematic metaphor in the face of the situation’s reality.

To build a bridge as a matter of pedagogy puts the interaction between multilingual and

monolingual students on the instructor, who is naturally at the top of a power hierarchy in the

classroom. When we look at it through this lens, the “building of a bridge” in the classroom

becomes less the act of mutual solidarity between diverse groups that the metaphor intends than

an expression of the instructor’s authority in the classroom space. When put the building of the

bridge into this context, it becomes an aggressive, borderline-colonial way of describing the way

an instructor facilitates student interaction. For this reason, it is good that we abandon this way of

speaking and use it as a frame of reference to address instructional authority in social interaction

between student groups.

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Where does this leave us, though? We may acknowledge the barrier. We may even throw

away the building of bridges, but we have not corrected the disparity in advantage between

multilingual and monolingual students or even made overt gestures in that direction. However, I

think that we can see a method of redressing the issue somewhat when we take a key piece of

scholarship and use it to inform our view of the students observed in the classroom. In

“International students in English-speaking universities: Adjustment factors,” Maureen Snow

Andrade references that a difficulty to adjust to a primarily English-speaking environment can be

due to both cultural differences and a limited proficiency in the English language. If this was the

case, why did Student B succeed in integrating with the monolingual students in her group while

Student C did not? The clear and definite answer is the presence of Student A in Student B’s

group, while Student C had no colingual students in hers. Having colingual students in the

classroom with them can help multilingual students adjust to a predominantly English-speaking

classroom.

This assertion may sound counterintuitive. Surely a cohort of colingual, multilingual

students speaking the same language among themselves to the exclusion of English would do the

opposite of helping one to adjust to his or her English-speaking surroundings, but the help of a

colingual friend helped Student B with her individual assignment. She understood the material

more quickly for Student A’s help than she would have with just the instructor or an English-

speaking monolingual friend to help her, and this is without even beginning to comment on the

difference in group study outcomes between Student B and Student C. Not to mention the fact

that Students A and B were two people and their monolingual partners were also two people

meant that they met on a more even playing field, rather than one side having an obvious

majority and steering the group, as unfortunately happened in Student C’s case with the one-to-
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two minority. The case of Student C conforms to the pattern of data established in Zhu’s study,

but that study does not account for mixed groups that incorporate more than one multilingual

student, as in the cases of Students A and B. As opposed to our intuition as it may seem, I think it

may be an unambiguously good thing for multilingual students to have a group colingual

students in the classroom with them, especially if there is a wide gap between their proficiency at

spoken English. At the very least, the notion warrants further observation, experimentation,

study, and analysis to see how far this might go both to redressing an imbalance of power and

increasing multilingual student performance in the language classroom.

Conclusion

While the phrase “to build a bridge,” may have its place as a metaphor, it does not serve

as an accurate one to describe the way in which effective English classrooms might successfully

integrate their multilingual students. To build a bridge may connect a English-speaking

monolingual population with a multilingual student, but we cannot forget that it also fixes the

student to that monolingual world. When we suggest the “building of a bridge,” we imply that

multilingual students require a bridge or even that they must make use of one. Most importantly,

the building of that “bridge” can often set us as instructors on behaviors that can make our

multilingual students feel more alienated or disadvantaged in the classroom and negatively

impact their performance of tasks. Framing the discussion surrounding multilingualism in the

composition classroom in this way is not helpful, when, almost paradoxically, the thing that can

best help multilingual to learn in a monolingual setting is the flexibility necessary to learn from

and with their colingual peers.

Now, this is not to say that we cannot still reach out to our multilingual students and help

them adjust without depriving them of that avenue of learning. A multilingual student may learn
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from his or her colingual peers and from his or her instructors. The two are not mutually

exclusive, as we saw during the individual exercise in which Student A aided Student B in

understanding the instructor’s criticism. The important thing for our multilingual students in the

classroom is that they learn the fundamentals of composition needed to succeed in an academic

environment. Whether they learn through interactions with their colingual peers, their

monolingual peers, or their instructors (or, like as not, some combination of the three) is less

important than the fact that they are learning the material. As such, let us allow our multilingual

students to connect with us, our culture, and our conventions at their own pace and not deprive

them of any resource that might contribute to their success.

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Works Cited

Andrade, M. S. (2006). International students in English-speaking universities: Adjustment

factors. Journal of Research in International Education, 5(2), 131-154.

Lotherington, H., & Jenson, J. (2011). Teaching multimodal and digital literacy in L2 settings:

New literacies, new basics, new pedagogies. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 31,

226–246.

Zhu, W. (2001). Interaction and feedback in mixed peer response groups. Journal of Second

Language Writing, 10, 251– 276.