Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Teaching

Overview

Ubuntu is an African concept often translated as “I am because we are.” More than a simple proverb, it evokes our deep interdependence—the recognition that our individual growth thrives best when it is nurtured in community with others (Tran and Wall 2019.) In higher education settings, this spirit of Ubuntu reminds us that all students, including those who have traveled across the world to be here, bring perspectives and histories that can elevate the collective.

International and multilingual students enrich our classrooms and campuses with invaluable knowledge, diverse perspectives, and rich lived experiences, challenging educators to adopt inclusive and equitable practices. Currently, international students account for about 15% of UC Berkeley's total student population at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. To provide context for the competitive nature of international students enrolling at UC Berkeley, in 2024, over 22,000 international students applied at the undergraduate level; of those, just over 700 were accepted, which calculates to around 3% of the applicants. When reflecting on the high level of competition for enrollment at UC Berkeley, it prompts us to consider greater care in offering orientation and support to our international students in our courses. Many such students navigate multiple challenges simultaneously:

Academic language proficiency requirements
Cultural adjustments to U.S. academic expectations
Different educational backgrounds and learning approaches
Social and cultural adaptation
Additional cognitive load from constantly operating in a non-native language

These interwoven challenges can impact their well-being and academic success. Addressing these factors allows us to create supportive classroom environments that benefit all students.

Starting Point for Growth: Self-Reflection & Awareness

A powerful framework for teaching multilingual learners is grounded in humanizing pedagogies, which center students’ sociocultural backgrounds, languages, and identities (Peercy et al., 2023.) As educators, our journey toward creating equitable learning environments begins with honest self-reflection—acknowledging the unique contributions of each student's personal history, cultural knowledge, and linguistic resources. Although Peercy and colleagues propose six core practices to guide teaching, we invite you to focus on three key practices as a starting point for deepening your self-awareness:

Knowing and Valuing Multilingual Students: Reflect on how you actively learn about your students’ cultural histories, and prior schooling experiences. Ask yourself: Am I truly understanding students’ unique background and the assets they bring? Recognizing these factors is essential to honoring their whole identities.
Building a Humanizing Classroom Community: Consider whether your classroom environment consistently creates a welcoming, inclusive, and respectful space where every student feels a strong sense of belonging. Reflect on your interactions and the norms you set: Are students encouraged to share ideas, work collaboratively, and celebrate one another’s cultural and linguistic assets?
Challenging Deficit Perspectives: Examine your assumptions and the language you use when thinking about multilingualism and cultural diversity. Ask yourself: Do I sometimes, even unintentionally, view differences as obstacles rather than strengths? Reflect on ways to reframe these perspectives by promoting an asset-based mindset that recognizes students’ linguistic and cultural knowledge as key contributors to the learning process.

Building upon humanizing pedagogies, this resource also embraces the principle of radical empathy. In essence, radical empathy in this context is culturally and linguistically responsive teaching in action. It’s about moving beyond simple awareness to proactive adaptation, creating a truly reciprocal and humanizing learning environment. In such an environment, faculty and students learn with and from each other, grounded in mutual respect and a deep valuing of diverse perspectives.

When you begin to feel distant from a student or lack empathy, take a moment to notice, pause, and try to reconnect:

Notice. Notice your feelings of anger, frustration, or stress and see them as a sign that you have disconnected with your student.	Scenario: A professor reads yet another email from a student asking for an extension due to an “emergency” The professor feels irritated and senses mistrust forming. Instead of brushing it off, the professor notices this frustration as a warning sign of having begun to disconnect.
Pause. Ask yourself, what is going on for me here? What about your student’s behavior, approach, or performance is sparking these feelings or physical reactions for you?	Scenario: Realizing they’re irritated, the professor takes a moment to pause and reflect: “Why is this bugging me so much? Am I worried about fairness for other students? Do I feel manipulated? Am I worried about being taken advantage of?”
Reconnect. Sometimes, simply by recognizing our feelings, we are able to regain presence with a student. Other times, you may need to search for a positive interaction with your student, behavior, characteristic, or moment that can help you reconnect.	Scenario: After feeling the initial surge of frustration (and pausing to acknowledge it), the professor decides to look for something positive or at least neutral about the student’s behavior: “Well, they’re still emailing me with each crisis rather than going silent. That shows they’re not giving up on the course.”
Go Further. Recognize instincts of defensiveness or an urgency to seek sanctuary in the power of your position. Engage with these feelings motivating further disconnection to seek to understand them more deeply.	Scenario: Now that the professor has regained empathy, they go further by asking more questions, rather than simply granting the extension: “Is something ongoing preventing you from meeting deadlines? What support might you need beyond extensions?” The professor may realize the student has deeper family or work issues and either refer them to campus resources or help them devise a plan. The professor might also check their own pattern of frustration with repeated emergencies—acknowledging any personal baggage that intensifies their reaction.

Before Teaching

Clear communication fosters trusting relationships from the outset. Teacher-scholars emphasize the value of an inclusive syllabus that spells out all the class norms, guidelines, and policies (Pacansky-Brock.)

Articulate Course Goals and Participation Norms
Describe how you expect students to engage: Are discussions a core part of the course? Should they post questions asynchronously? Provide these details so that students who are unfamiliar with U.S. classroom customs—like open debate or direct questioning—understand from day one.
Explain Academic Honesty and Plagiarism Policies
Recognize that citation and collaboration practices might differ across cultures. Offer clear examples of acceptable vs. unacceptable forms of group work, highlight Berkeley honor code, and invite questions. Doing so preemptively addresses confusion around co-authorship or sharing of notes. Consider also modeling academic honesty by citing references in your lecture slides or assignment instructions, demonstrating how to acknowledge sources correctly.
Model Access to Campus Resources
Explicitly listing campus services like Student Learning Center, Graduate Writing Center, English Language Resources, or comparable offices to normalize help-seeking for all students, particularly those who may be hesitant.
Demystify Office Hours
Office hours may not exist in some students’ previous academic contexts. Dedicate a short paragraph in your syllabus or a brief in-class explanation to demystify office hours. Explain what happens during office hours – a space for questions, clarification, deeper discussion, and individual connection. This proactive explanation can significantly reduce student hesitation, encourage timely questions, and foster stronger student-faculty rapport.
Mitigate the “Hidden Curriculum”
This might clarify whether you value or expect direct challenges to the professor’s viewpoint, how to address you, or how group projects and peer reviews typically work. This transparency reduces cognitive load for multilingual learners.

During Teaching

Inviting Multilingual Resources
Tavares (2022) emphasizes that many multilingual individuals think in multiple languages at once, switching flexibly for deeper comprehension or creativity. Faculty who intentionally welcome brief translanguaging moments—such as allowing students to brainstorm in their strongest language, or giving them the option to create bilingual notes—can lower language barriers without compromising academic rigor. Researchers in math education (Rhodes et al. 2024; Sepeng. 2013) have found that allowing students to use their home dialect or language during the “exploratory” phase of problem-solving can deepen their initial understanding. By brainstorming in a familiar linguistic register, novice learners can clarify new concepts before translating their ideas into academic English.
Using Multiple Modalities to Convey Course Material
Research (Hartshorn et al. 2017) indicates that “double processing” of content and language can tax students’ cognitive load. Being mindful of linguistics and cultural barriers requires conscious adaptation of teaching methods and materials to ensure equitable access to learning for all students. In class, many instructors find that providing multiple ways to access information—slides, short lecture outlines, or posted vocabulary lists—helps students follow along without scrambling to capture every word. Where pedagogically possible, chunk lectures into shorter segments so students have time to catch up on note-taking. Similarly, allowing them to preview slides or read short summaries of upcoming topics ahead of class encourages more confident engagement.

Guiding Effective Participation and Collaborative Work
Traditional models of open debate or rapid-fire question-and-answer can be particularly daunting for students unfamiliar with these communicative norms. Rather than simply inviting students to “ask questions any time,” it can help to build in small-group discussions, reflective pauses, or structured problem-solving segments. Also, share guidelines for productive group interactions, assigning roles or inviting students to propose their own.
Asset-Based Bridging
Recognize your students as experts on their own cultures and experiences. Incorporate activities where students can share examples from their home cultures related to course topics. For example, if discussing health policies, you might ask: “How might this be handled in your home country, or how have you seen it approached in an international context?”
Diversify Examples and Case Studies
Go beyond U.S.-centric examples. Incorporate case studies from international sources, use readings from scholars with diverse cultural backgrounds, and when relevant, use current global events to illustrate course concepts.
Contextualizing Cultural References
Provide brief backstories on U.S.-specific references or culturally specific background knowledge—historical events, local geographic examples, or cultural traditions. Even one or two sentences clarifying a concept can help international students anchor new material.

“In my experience, social science or humanities courses can be particularly challenging for EAL students. For instance, the readings are often full of abstract concepts and academic terminology, which are hard to grasp because they are not part of everyday language. Since readings are in direct correlation with lectures, I find it extremely difficult to keep up with the pace of the class. Furthermore, most discussions that revolve around such words and phrases center around the contexts of the United States or California.”*

After Teaching

Transparent Assignments and Assessments
Elaborating on “transparent design” helps students see the purpose, process, and evaluation criteria of each task. This can be as simple as posting a concise overview: “Here’s what this project will accomplish, the steps you’ll follow, and how I’ll grade it.” When introducing reading assignments, clarifying whether they require detailed mastery or a broader conceptual understanding can save international students considerable time in second-language reading (Hartshorn et al. 2017).
Paring Down the “Language Load” on Exams
If language complexity is not the skill you are testing, simpler instructions allow learners to demonstrate actual disciplinary knowledge rather than their ability to parse complicated English sentences. When feasible, early feedback or draft submissions encourage iterative improvement. Students can refine conceptual frameworks first, then address grammar points later. In courses that involve heavy written output, Mahalingappa and colleagues recommend rubrics that differentiate language-specific traits from content knowledge. This approach prevents minor linguistic differences from overshadowing mastery of material. Reflecting on student experience:

Flexible Deadlines for Summative Assessments
Because essay-based exams and major writing assignments can be time-intensive for multilingual students, you might consider offering slightly more time or structured drafting. This ensures that they can demonstrate content mastery without being penalized for the extra language processing involved.
Normalize Help-Seeking
As mentioned earlier, connecting students with resources for help-seeking behaviors builds a supportive academic culture that promotes student success beyond the classroom. Student Learning Center has a wide range of programs to support students at UC Berkeley. Review their program page and bring awareness to these supports in your syllabus, bCourses, or provide an announcement about ways to access these resources for students.

*All the student narratives used in this guide were gathered by Pearl Zhao and Emily Chang from the ASUC Office of Senator Annabel Wang.

“One of the main challenges I’ve faced as an EAL student is writing, particularly in courses that have a heavy focus on essays. My writing process usually begins with generating ideas in my mother tongue, then translating those thoughts into English. However, these steps are disadvantageous when it comes to the flow and speed of my writing.”*

Additional Resources

There are numerous organizations supporting international students at UC Berkeley. A central service is the Berkeley International Office, whose mission is to enhance the academic experiences of international students and scholars by providing the highest levels of knowledge and expertise in advising, immigration services, advocacy, and programming to the UC Berkeley campus community.

International Student Stories

We are Cal
From these stories, Gulyani (1/25/2025) reflected that interviews with international students surfaced, “... the importance of friendship for international students, and embodied the otherwise abstract concept of home away from home [in an interview with a sophomore student ] …also emphasized the importance of creating a door for opportunities that might not knock instead of waiting for them to come by.”