This article explores how we eliminated—without lowering student success rates—our developmental writing and reading courses (three to seven noncredit hours) and shifted to an all-inclusive, no-placement-necessary, integrated reading and writing course for first-year comp.

This TETYC symposium centers anti-ableist action across two-year college institutional contexts, including the writing classroom (Olivas), writing centers (Van Dyke and Lovett), a Writing Across the Curriculum Program (Rousculp), and basic writing (Naomi Bernstein). Taken together, these authors offer insights into establishing anti-ableist practices in two-year college English studies with careful attention to multiple marginalized identities.

Drawing on interviews from faculty at one community college in Texas, this case study focuses on one college and the change process faculty experienced in integrating its developmental reading and writing curriculum. This study centers on the faculty perspective of policy and curriculum implementation, a voice that is often lost or underrepresented in the research literature and offers insight into how colleges can support their faculty who are responding to curricular change and/or policy mandates.

This study explores two community college developmental writing courses that made use of mobile devices and apps, specifically iPads and iPhones, iTunes U, and Apple Books as primary learning materials and devices.

This article shares findings from a semester-long study about the use of literacy narratives to increase ESL students’ understanding of reading and writing relationships within the developmental writing classroom.

This essay and the teaching externship it describes grew out of our attempt to respond to gaps in two-year college English instructor preparation, particularly in basic writing, at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska.

Self-annotation forces students to build sideline commentary for their own writing. As a self-assessment strategy, annotation at every stage of the writing process turns underprepared writers into more confident decision makers and communicators.

An experimental study shows that integrating instruction in writing strategies with support for self-regulation strategies in basic writing classes results in significant gains in both the quality of student writing and in student motivation.

This article uses quantitative and qualitative means to assess the impact of an Accelerated Learning Program on the performance and satisfaction of students designated ESL and developmental at a large, urban community college.

This essay details the foundational theory as well as the practical problems that led to the creation of this class project that focuses on authentic audience and persistent revision practices. The author won a Diana Hacker Award.

Five two-year-college writer-teachers from different states (California, Colorado, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Wisconsin) present ways that creative writers can make particular contributions to the important and meaningful work of teaching basic skills composition, particularly at institutions of access, and particularly at this time when that work is so crucial.

This article discusses the contradictions of portfolio reflective writing for basic writing students and suggests a more dialogic option of third-party address.

The authors argue for a critically reflective model of service-learning by detailing the features of a project in which an ESL reading and developmental writing class interviewed Holocaust survivors for the Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives.

The article provides suggestions for using a grading contract/portfolio approach to assessing writing for introductory composition classes comprised of basic writers.

A pilot study finds that branching, just-in-time curriculum may be of considerable benefit to some basic writing students.

This article describes working with a deaf student in a basic writing course and explores what teaching deaf students can teach us about composition studies.

Reviewed are: Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United States, by J. M. Beach, reviewed by Keith Kroll Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader (3rd ed.), edited by Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola, Reviewed by Kathleen Tamayo Alves Basic Writing, by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk, Reviewed by Chitralekha Duttagupta The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley, Reviewed by Howard Tinberg

Instruction that fosters intertextual awareness in basic writers can help them overcome their tendency to compartmentalize what they learn from academic texts and thereby help them make rich connections among the texts they read and write.

An outcomes assessment project we conducted at our open admissions institution turned out to be considerably more enjoyable and worthwhile than we anticipated.

Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 , by Kelly Ritter, Reviewed by William DeGenaro Teaching Developmental Writing, by Susan Naomi Bernstein; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 , by Kelly Ritter, Reviewed by Gregory Shafer William DeGenaro’s Response to Gregory Shafer; Gregory Shafer’s Response to William DeGenaro

Reviewed are: Two Million Minutes, Directed by Chad Heeter, Reviewed by Eric BatemanOriginality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, Edited by Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus, and Who Owns This Text? Plagiarism, Authorship, and Disciplinary Cultures, Edited by Carol Peterson Haviland and Joan A. Mullin, Reviewed by Benie Colvin Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, Edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander, Reviewed by Kathrynn Di Tommaso

This essay describes the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning project examining the transition of underprepared first-year writers at an open admission institution as they struggled to translate their first-semester instruction into second-semester success.

In this article, we offer practical suggestions for teaching writing to diverse groups of students who represent the fields of composition studies, basic writing, and ESL.

A film that presents a compelling and particularly American moral dilemma provides the scaffolding that helps basic writing students to construct convincing argumentative essays.

Case histories of basic writing programs at regional campuses need to incorporate concerns of social class. Attention to class helps scholars identify institutional patterns that distance basic writing from the university’s mainstream business.

Contrastive rhetoric provides tools that community college teachers need in order to understand the rhetorical forms that students from other cultures employ. Greater understanding of contrastive rhetoric can change the way that teachers interpret the difficulty linguistically different students may have in using conventional American academic writing patterns and can provide new avenues for teaching those patterns.

E-mail peer response teaches students about audience and text more effectively than synchronous peer response.

Presents a questionnaire that helps gather valuable information about students’ attitudes toward mandatory placement in basic writing courses. Concludes that with the kind of information gleaned from responses to questionnaires similar to this one, educators can better understand the strengths and weaknesses of basic writing programs and revise their curriculum and placement procedures as necessary.

Presents a sequenced writing assignment on shopping to aid basic writers. Describes a writing assignment focused around online and mail-order shopping. Notes steps in preparing for the assignment, the sequence, and discusses responses to the assignments.

Presents and describes a narrative writing assignment used by the author in a developmental writing course that helps to demonstrate to students how and why sexist language usage can limit thinking, sometimes injuriously, and that concretely illustrates how language and gender stereotyping interact causally. Describes the assignment, how it is used in class, and class discussions resulting.

Describes how the author uses the poems of Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” in her developmental writing classes to foster literary discussion, build vocabulary, and teach a broad range of essay writing skills.

Shows how letter writing can motivate basic writers. Describes how the author began teaching his first remedial writing class with a class-wide engagement in letter writing. Discusses how the class developed an active, collaborative, engaged, and inclusive spirit as students learned to put expression first and polishing later.

Considers how the revising skills of basic writing students improve when they receive both inductive and deductive teacher feedback. Finds that students who received inductive feedback changed their largest percent of errors when given oral conferences and students who received deductive feedback changed their smallest number of errors when given oral feedback.

Considers how allowing developmental students to incorporate some of their language and culture into their writing helps them become more proficient writers. Suggests that the best way to teach basic writers is through both process and a respect for the social discovery that ensues as one composes.

Reviews five books: Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing, by Mina Shaughnessy; Telling Writing, by Ken Macrorie; Writing without Teachers, by Peter Elbow; Structured Reading, by Lynn Quitman Troyka and Joseph W. Thweatt; Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, by Stephen D. Krashen.

Reviews six books: Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work, by Jane Maher reviewed by Judith A. (Jay) Wootten; Your Choice: A Basic Writing Guide with Readings, by Kate Mangelsdorf and Evelyn Posey reviewed by Lynn Summer; Constructing Knowledges: The Politics of Theory Building and Pedagogy in Composition, by Sidney I. Dobrin reviewed by Julie Drew; Academic Advancement in Composition Studies: Scholarship, Publication, Promotion, Tenure, ed. by Richard C. Gebhardt and Barbara Genelle Smith Gebhardt; Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. by Gary A. Olson and Todd Taylor; Writing for Academic Publication, by Frank Parker and Kathryn Riley reviewed by Cynthia Simpson.

Argues that, to deal effectively with sentence errors of basic writers, it is crucial to distinguish between what should be left alone and what can be productively marked and how it should be marked. Proposes a taxonomy of four sources of errors (knowledge, dialect, process, and developmental errors) and seven ways to address them.

Describes how one teacher uses life writing (reading and writing about transformative life experiences) in her basic writing class to engage students and to help them understand the power and purpose of reaching out to a variety of audiences. Discusses grading life writing.

Argues that the labels "basic" or "developmental" as applied to students often obscure the complexities of knowing who is underprepared for what, kinds of barriers that countermand mastery, and instructors’ roles in helping construct these barriers. Views closely the behaviors by which four students in a developmental writing class presented themselves.

Contends that developmental writing students’ self confidence improves when they understand their learning styles. Outlines how the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is used to pinpoint students’ learning styles and how to help students work "their way."

Considers why basic writers write in "phrases patched upon phrases." Examines how language is patterned and acquired to clarify a framework for teaching basic writers. States that speaking and writing, two different ways of organizing and presenting information, have different structures. Explores what cognitive psychology can say about how the mind processes and produces language.

Diane Allen, in "Tapping the Sources Within: A Three-Step Approach", gives a strategy for helping basic writing students develop better essays with stronger voices.

Preview this article: Computers, Reading, and Basic Writers: Online Strategies for Helping Students with Academic Texts, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/23/3/teachingenglishinthetwoyearcollege5490-1.gif

Using diverse texts to critically examine America’s melting pot ideal supports basic writing students’ successful matriculation through rhetorically and socially challenging locations.