ABSTRACT
Prior to 2012, the multilingual student population at Indiana University reflected similar trends to those of other nonurban, public flagship universities across the midwestern region of the United States: its largest enrollments consisted of students with Asian, Arabic, and Indo-Aryan linguistic heritages (University-wide, 2015). Most of these students were identified as “ESL” and tracked through the registrar by their visa/immigration status, and the resident multilingual population (generally smaller than the international student population) went largely untracked. Resident multilinguals were identified through a frustrating pattern of adding and dropping the “basic” and “regular” first-year composition courses, or because of mismatched expectations among instructors and students, sometimes sidelined with complaints about plagiarism and attrition. Even on a campus that prided itself on recognizing the heterogeneity of second language acquisition (SLA) students’ needs, the majority of language support structures served to buoy the experiences of foreign students. In my role as coordinator of multilingual composition from 2007–2012, I sought to include resident multilingual students in these support structures, and to help trouble students’ linguistic identifications for first-year composition (FYC) even more (Demont-Heinrich, 2010; Ortmeier-Hooper, 2008; Spack, 1997).
