The linguistic diversity among university students has many implications for teaching reading in South African higher education. For instance, first-year students bring with them varying levels of proficiency in English which is used as a language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in all higher education institutions (HEis) in the country. This immensely influences the ways the students engage with academic texts. This article is a conceptual analysis that examines how these linguistic differences can be accommodated in the teaching of reading to determine the role they can play in helping students to improve their reading abilities. It emanates from a recommendation from a study that was conducted to examine academic reading strategies among multilingual first-year students in a South African university. A desktop qualitative study was done to review existing studies on how students’ varying linguistic backgrounds can be accommodated in reading programs and utilised to help improve levels of proficiency in English. The study identified a need to reconsider the approaches that are used to teach reading at university to accommodate the students’ varying levels of English proficiency, based on their linguistic backgrounds. The article recommends that more robust research on interventions that can embrace the first-year students’ diverse linguistic backgrounds to help enhance their reading abilities needs to be conducted.

Keywords: Diverse linguistic backgrounds, English language proficiency, teaching reading, reading abilities, first-year students.