Writing Strategies for Elementary Multilingual Writers: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Because of the Common Core State Standards (2010), all elementary students across the United States, including multilingual learners, must learn to compose written texts in opinion, informational, and narrative genres. By nature, writing also plays many diverse roles in educational settings, and advanced writing skills are needed for students to reach interdisciplinary success. Specifically, writing can be incorporated into content-area learning in subjects such as science, social studies, and math to support genre-based writing development. While advanced writing can be challenging for any student to master, multilingual students may need additional support to develop these crucial composition skills because of the complexities of learning two languages simultaneously. Furthermore, while many educators understand that multilingual students have distinct literacy needs, not all teachers are prepared to meet these specific writing instructional demands. This article presents the results of a systematic review guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach. This study investigated literacy-based empirical research used to support multilingual learners since the inception of the Common Core (2010–2023) genre-based writing standards. In characterizing effective writing supports, seven themes emerged: (a) the role of the teacher, (b) writing mentor texts, (c) the creation of multimodal texts, (d) writing scaffolds, (e) authenticity, (f) specific teacher instruction, and (g) multilingual language approaches. While this body of research is literacy-focused, these findings provide elementary teachers with specific strategies to support developing multilingual writers when implemented into traditional literacy spaces or content-area instruction.