As a teacher, I am always thinking about how to build background knowledge for my students in order to understand a text or content. But when writing personal narratives, the entire task is centered around the personal experiences and schema that they already have! For this reason, personal narrative writing can be one of the toughest writing genres to teach newcomers and emerging bilinguals (if the teacher does not fluently speak the same primary language as the student). I can’t begin to count the amount of times I have told a student “I can’t tell you what to write because I wasn’t there when it happened.” It can be challenging, for sure, but I’ve come up with several strategies that have helped me to draw stories out of my students that eventually get written on paper as fluent text!

Focus on pre-writing

When you’re working with a multilingual student who is attempting to write a story in English, the heaviest portion of the writing process will be focused on pre-writing. This stage is all about front-loading students with vocabulary, phrases, and sentence structures that they can use in their writing.

Get your students talking so that they can get to writing! Use the pre-writing stage as an opportunity for your students to get some speaking practice by having them draw a story from their lives and talk about it with others. Non-linguistic representations such as drawings are a great way to effectively communicate a story across all languages. As they’re discussing their drawings, guide them to generate word lists with key words to describe the beginning, middle, and end of their story. Ask questions using the 6 key question words (who/what/when/where/why/how) to elicit more details, if necessary. For a little extra speaking practice, their peers can be the ones to ask the questions! Soon, your students should have lists of words, phrases, and sentences they can use to generate a beginning, middle, and end for their story.

My students use a recording sheet for their word lists that provides spaces for different categories and senses. If you’d like a free copy of this Words to Use page, you can get it here!

Structured drafting

In the drafting stage of writing personal narratives, multilingual learners will need a range of scaffolded support. For students at levels 1-2, they will likely need highly structured drafting supports such as paragraph or sentence frames and detailed graphic organizers. Students who are developing and expanding, however, should be provided with optional sentence starters and graphic organizers with more room for their own original writing. This is highly individualized and will depend on each learner’s needs, but ALL students will definitely need some sort of graphic organizer in order to write the beginning, middle, and end of their story! Remember to give students access to their lists from the brainstorming/prewriting stage as they write their story. You could even recommend that they place a checkmark by each word, phrase, or sentence from their word lists as they include it in their story. 

Some students might even need a cloze activity in which they add single words or phrases into a paragraph frame that is created by the teacher. Of course, we don’t want writing to be formulaic and robotic– writer’s voice is so important for writing an engaging text– and for native English speakers, a paragraph frame truly does take away a writer’s voice. But for emerging bilinguals, structured paragraph frames actually do quite the opposite: they empower students to HAVE a writer’s voice by lightening the complex linguistic load and ONLY adding in the parts that make their story unique, thus adding in their own personal writer’s voice! For some students, providing a structured cloze activity for a personal narrative will amplify their voice in English, because without it they wouldn’t have been able to effectively communicate their story at all.

Revising & Editing

The final stages of the writing process will also depend on the level of your learners. There is plenty of research on error correction and its value in English language development (or lack thereof), which is why I do not personally emphasize strict revising and editing in my students’ writing pieces when they are below Level 3. A heavy amount of their writing pieces will probably be copied from your modeled sentence/paragraph frames anyway, so that should cut down on their need to revise or edit too much of their writing!

However, students learn a lot from modeling and teaching one another, so these stages are perfect opportunities to teach things like past tense, S-V agreement, use of punctuation, or how to use tools like dictionaries, glossaries, or Google Translate to determine accurate spelling of a word.

Publishing

Give your students the gift of recording their story in a way that will stand the test of time, so they can share it with their families and friends for years to come. Let them choose the mode in which they want to publish their story– do they want to share it orally and save a video of themselves reading their story aloud, or do they want a written/typed copy to share physically? After publishing in English, consider allowing them to share their story in their primary language, as well, to honor that part of their identity and to provide access to non-English speaking family members or friends. Help them to share their stories with others in a way that empowers them and helps them to understand that we all have a voice and a story to share with others– especially those who are linguistically gifted!

You don’t NEED any one resource in order to try out these strategies for supporting your MLs with writing personal narratives– ESL strategies can be implemented on notebook paper, the whiteboard, or chart paper– but if you’re looking for something quick and easy to print and use tomorrow, I’ve got all of those supports (and more!) available to you in my Personal Narrative Writing Kit for ELLs. You can get it here. I even included a digital version on Google Slides that includes audio prompts for students who are working on this independently!

I hope you are able to empower your students to tell their own stories using the suggestions I’ve given above. I promise it’s worth it to add these important scaffolds to your writing instruction!