Writing support in a multilingual context: what do staff and students need?

This paper reports on an extensive analysis of language learning needs performed amongst staff and students at a multilingual university. Although needs analysis is a well established method to inform specific language teaching (Basturkmen 2010), few studies have analysed writing support needs in general (Kruse 2013, Kruse & Meyer & Everke Buchanan in press) or writing support needs in multilingual contexts (Huemer & Rheindorf & Wetschanow 2014). In this paper, we will focus on the needs for writing support in English, French, German and Luxembourgish across faculties at the University of Luxembourg, where most degree programmes are multilingual. In addition to the results for these two groups, we will discuss the (mis)match between staff and student perceptions of students’ needs. Results are from 24 semi-structured interviews and online questionnaires (staff n=559, students n=364) covering all faculties. Not surprisingly, academic staff and postdoctoral researchers report the greatest need for support in writing research genres, i.e. papers and proposals, chiefly in English. They also felt students mostly required instruction in writing assignments and dissertations in English. Students, however, would like support in writing assignments and dissertations in all four languages. Finally, when looking at the overall results for staff and students, it is striking that the need for general language training, especially conversational skills, in all four languages outstrips the reported need for academic language instruction. We will discuss how these results informed our course design across different programs and faculties.