What is First-Year Writing (FYW)

In this chapter, the author described classroom activities designed to aid multilingual first-year writing (FYW) students' reading comprehension of assigned course texts. The author referred to these activities as “translation” because students engaged in two types of translation—literal and pedagogical—to rephrase challenging texts into sentence constructions and concepts with which they felt familiar, thus enhancing their ability to comprehend and respond to those texts. The activities were helpful to multilingual writers, who used their home language to access the words, phrases, and concepts of the target language. Further, the activities enabled students' agency over their understandings of and reactions to their course readings, which provided authority and authenticity to their writing. The classroom activities were explained in detail and include teacher/student dialogue to provide detailed context of the activities in real-time. The author provided the scholarly underpinnings of the activities and discussed their pedagogical implications in FYW and across the curriculum.