Empowering Writers: What Graham, Taboada Barber, Wexler—and Now AI—Teach Us About Writing Instruction for Multilingual Learners

Empowering Writers: What Graham, Taboada Barber, Wexler—and Now AI—Teach Us About Writing Instruction for Multilingual Learners

Written by Amelia Larson

To become great writers, students need to develop a range of interconnected skills that span cognitive, linguistic, and affective domains. Writing is not only a tool for communication, but also a powerful vehicle for learning, identity formation, and academic achievement—especially for multilingual learners.

Leading researcher Steve Graham has shown that writing instruction is most effective when it is explicit, strategy-based, and integrated with reading and content learning. His work emphasizes that students benefit most when they are taught how to plan, draft, revise, and reflect on their writing in structured and meaningful ways.

Ana Taboada Barber expands this lens through her work on motivation, engagement, and culturally responsive literacy, especially for bilingual and multilingual learners. She emphasizes that students thrive when they are given autonomy, relevance, and opportunities to draw upon their linguistic and cultural backgrounds—all of which fuel deeper engagement and stronger writing performance.

Natalie Wexler, through her advocacy of The Writing Revolution, contributes a foundational insight: students—especially those who struggle—must first master writing at the sentence level before progressing to paragraphs and extended texts. Her approach emphasizes teaching grammar, syntax, and sentence structure in context, tied to content knowledge, ensuring that writing is both meaningful and manageable for all learners.

Together, the work of Graham, Taboada Barber, and Wexler offers a comprehensive foundation for designing writing instruction that is equitable, rigorous, and empowering. But as classrooms evolve, so do the tools we use—and that brings us to one of the most significant developments in writing instruction today: artificial intelligence.

Steve Graham: Writing as a Structured, Teachable Process

Research Highlights:

• • Writing improves reading comprehension, content learning, and overall academic performance.
  • Explicit instruction in writing strategies—especially planning, drafting, and revising—has a strong, measurable impact.
  • Teaching writing across content areas increases depth of understanding and retention.
  • Motivation and self-regulation are critical components of writing success.

Instructional Recommendations:

• • Teach strategies explicitly (e.g., SRSD – Self-Regulated Strategy Development).
  • Provide frequent opportunities for meaningful writing, across subjects.
  • Incorporate revision, peer feedback, and publishing as regular practice.
  • Use bilingual SRSD graphic organizers to guide persuasive writing (“I think ___ because ___” / “Yo pienso que ___ porque ___”).
  • Integrate writing in science journals where students can first discuss their ideas in their home language, then write in English.
  • Provide targeted revision checklists with visuals and home-language scaffolds (e.g., “Check your topic sentence – Frase principal – الجملة الرئيسية”).

Ana Taboada Barber: Motivation, Language, and Culturally Responsive Writing

Research Highlights: 

• • Engagement is driven by relevance, choice, and cultural connection.
  • Background knowledge and linguistic resources (including the home language) support deeper comprehension and more sophisticated writing.
  • Autonomy-supportive practices increase writing confidence and output—particularly for multilingual learners.

Instructional Recommendations:

• • Design writing tasks that connect to students’ identities, communities, and cultural funds of knowledge.
  • Offer writing choices and voice—across genres and formats.
  • Build bridges between languages by valuing home language use as a tool for thinking and drafting.

• • Invite students to write personal narratives or oral history stories in both English and their home language (e.g., Vietnamese-English bilingual storybooks).
  • Create thematic writing prompts that invite cultural sharing (e.g., “Describe a celebration in your culture” / “Describa una celebración de su cultura”).
  • Offer sentence stems that affirm identity (e.g., “One thing I love about where I’m from is…” / “Algo que me encanta de donde soy es…” / “Une chose que j’aime dans mon pays, c’est…”).

Natalie Wexler

Key Findings:

• • Writing should begin at the sentence level, especially for struggling or novice writers.
  • Grammar and syntax are best taught in context, using content knowledge as the foundation.
  • Students need systematic, explicit instruction in sentence construction before advancing to paragraphs and essays.

Instructional Recommendations:

• • Start with sentence-level tasks: sentence combining, deconstruction, and expansion.
  • Use writing to build and assess content knowledge—not just writing for its own sake.
  • Integrate writing routines directly into every subject area.
  • Teach sentence expansion using a multilingual word wall (e.g., “The ___ lived in the ___ because ___” with content-specific vocabulary in English and the student’s home language).
  • Use translation as a tool: Have students write a sentence in their home language (e.g., Urdu or Portuguese), then reconstruct it in English using a sentence scaffold.
  • Provide fill-in-the-blank frames for content writing (e.g., “The water cycle begins when ___ evaporates.” / “El ciclo del agua comienza cuando ___ se evapora.”).

AI Integration: Supporting Writing Without Replacing It

AI, when used thoughtfully, can become a powerful scaffold for multilingual learners—not a shortcut. It can provide real-time support, multilingual scaffolds, and revision guidance, but only when implemented within a pedagogically sound framework.

Key Highlights:

• • AI can give immediate feedback on grammar, sentence fluency, and organization, helping students revise independently.
  • It can support multilingual access, offering translations, definitions, or sentence rephrasing in students’ home languages.
  • When paired with human instruction, AI enhances—not replaces—the essential teaching of writing strategies, genre awareness, and motivation.

Responsible Use Principles:

• • Transparency: Students should understand what AI is doing and how to evaluate its feedback critically.
  • Human-Centered: AI should never replace planning, analyzing, or personal expression.
  • Culturally Responsive: AI tools should be selected and monitored to ensure they affirm linguistic and cultural diversity.

Classroom Applications for Multilingual Learners:

• • A newcomer student writes a science explanation in Spanish, uses AI to generate an English draft, and works with a teacher to revise for accuracy and voice.
  • Students explore AI-generated sentence variations and discuss which best reflects their meaning and style.
  • Teachers use AI to generate multilingual examples of a persuasive paragraph at multiple proficiency levels for differentiated instruction.

Putting It All Together: Balancing Structure, Identity, and Innovation

Strong writing instruction is not about choosing between structure and creativity, or between technology and tradition—it’s about designing ecosystems where students can build skill and voice at the same time.

Graham reminds us to teach writing with intention. Taboada Barber urges us to connect writing to identity and motivation. Wexler pushes us to begin with strong, clear sentences rooted in content. And AI, when used responsibly, offers a new layer of support—especially for those students who need more access points into language and literacy.

Writing is where multilingual learners begin to share not just what they know, but who they are. Our job is to give them the tools, space, and trust to do just that.

Additional Resources

Presentation on Research-Based Writing Interventions at the University of California Irvine

Presentation on  The Writing Revolution