Research suggests that many students placed in the lowest level developmental writing courses do not make it to first-year composition and never graduate. The authors explain how they redesigned the lowest level writing course with scaffolded writing assignments to allow students to work at an accelerated pace.  Instructors and tutors work with students individually and in small groups as they complete the assignments. To facilitate real-time feedback, the authors created a Google Drive folder for class use so that students would have access to planning materials and prompt writing feedback. Students have individual folders for their work, and process writing is easily accessible to students, tutors, and instructors. More students from this lowest level course are moving directly into the required first-year English composition course. This new course design effectively supports students at an open-access two-year college.

This article offers readers a case study of a course-based tutoring partnership that frames and enhances the focus on the stories of three participants—two with learning disabilities. The first part engages arguments involving connections between learning-disabled and typical basic writing students to ask the important question: should learning-disabled students receive more institutionally sanctioned time, attention, and pedagogical care than mainstream students, especially if they are also in basic writing courses? I offer course-based tutoring and peer review and response groups as loci for exploring that query. In the article’s second part, I narrate the sorts of ethical choices that emerged as I began to focus on the participants in this study. I describe the interactions of the participants as they worked together, and with other students, in two peer review and response sessions. The article’s third part provides a more intimate gaze into the backgrounds and experiences of all three participants, offering readers a sense of just how compelling and unexpected the participant stories proved to be, behind the scenes and beyond the classroom. The article concludes with some thoughts on how this poignant experience with two students with learning disabilities taught us all the value of what it means to struggle, to persevere, and to make the most of what “others” of all backgrounds and abilities have to offer.

Using Mariolina Salvatori’s difficulty paper assignment to explore student experiences when reading, this paper examines basic writing students’

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.

In this article, we investigate disparate impact analysis as a validation tool for understanding the local effects of writing assessment on diverse groups of students. Using a case study data set from a university that we call Brick City University, we explain how Brick City’s writing program undertook a self-study of its placement exam using the disparate impact process followed by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education. This three-step process includes analyzing placement rates through (1) a threshold statistical analysis, (2) a contextualized inquiry to determine whether the placement exam meets an important educational objective, and (3) a consideration of less discriminatory assessment alternatives. By employing such a process, Brick City re-conceptualized the role of placement testing and basic writing at the university in a way that was less discriminatory for Brick City’s diverse student population.

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.

Developmental composition courses serve a sizable and growing number of Generation 1.5 students, or long-term U.S. resident language learners, and it is believed that language challenges may be part of Generation 1.5 writers’ difficulty in controlling the academic register. The current study investigates possible similarities and differences between Generation 1.5 students ( n = 149) and two other student groups: mainstream first language (L1) writers ( n = 203) and more traditional second language (L2) writers ( n = 55), thus determining the extent to which language-use variables distinguish Generation 1.5 texts from those of their classmates. Results indicate significant differences between Generation 1.5 and L2 students on holistic writing quality, word errors, word class errors, verb errors, total identified errors, and spoken features of language. Generation 1.5 and L1 texts significantly differed on academic features of language. Implications are presented, suggesting that developmental Generation 1.5 writing may be more similar to L1 writing than has been previously reported.

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

Buell describes a basic writing graduate curriculum and analyzes a simulation activity for which students adopt stakeholder perspectives on a college-wide debate about mainstreaming basic writing students or moving basic writing to community college.

Interviews with eleven student participants in a two-semester Stretch writing course reveal strong student satisfaction, improved writing performance, and additional benefits in areas such as transitioning to college, connecting with other students, and forming relationships with faculty and online learning. Â

This es say describes a linked, community-engaged writing course, “Field Writing: Food Stories,” which was offered as part of an early college program for rural high school students at a regional public university. While demonstrating many of the benefits commonly attributed to public writing and service learning in composition, the course raised important questions about the politics of access and acceleration, and about the role of community-engaged coursework in continuing to protect room in the curriculum for both high school and college writers.

In this essay, Branstad discusses how he used service-learning informed by the scholarship on transfer to reimagine current-traditional assumptions common in composition and to create rhetorically-oriented pathways for student success. The evidence of student learning demonstrates the value of implementing service-learning techniques informed by the theory on transfer within the basic writing classroom.

Shivers-McNair and Inman analyze and reflect upon the dissolution of a partnership between their institution's basic writing program and writing center. In their network reading of the partnership, the authors argue that their efforts to combat institutional discourses about students and faculty in two marginalized programs were complicated by asymmetrical relations of power. The authors conclude with reflections on possibilities for partnerships and collaborations between marginalized programs.

This essay argues the benefits of a critical service-learning project in which English Language Learners and developmental writing students documented the stories of Holocaust survivors for a campus-based resource center at a two-year college. The authors demonstrate the importance of designing service-learning projects that promote reciprocity and sustained collaboration among participants and stress the need to structure such projects to meet the needs of community college students.

Students writing for an authentic audience in service-learning composition courses often face a double-audience dilemma. The texts they compose must suit the demands of the real-world audience of the service-learning project while also meeting the expectations of the academic audience. This article examines the role multimodal composition may play in helping alleviate the tension of the double audience, particularly for basic writers.

This program profile examines efforts by WPAs at York College, a senior college in the CUNY system, to adapt to externally imposed changes and develop a locally meaningful writing program. 1999 marked the end of remediation at four-year (senior) colleges in The City University of New York. The elimination of developmental writing at CUNY’s senior colleges was accompanied by a university-wide mandate for WAC. Fall 2013 marked the start of a university-wide set of general education requirements that will partially eclipse existing local requirements. Between these two bookends, WPAs—drawing on a mindset of relative agency and informed by an awareness of the curricular and institutional positioning of writing—carried out local efforts to build a more effective and coherent program.

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.

This article involves an examination of public discourse surrounding Ayers v. Fordice, one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to explore how such discourse affects our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi, but also more globally. Archived local newspaper articles and letters to state government officials from private citizens suggest that the public overwhelmingly adheres to concepts of standards-based education. This research is meant to further stimulate conversations in the field about how we define basic writers and how to provide these students with the opportunity to define themselves.

Wendy Ryden and Ian Marshall’s Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness is a difficult book, but an important one for scholars interested in rhetoric, whiteness studies, and basic writing. It is an eclectic and intricate set of musings on writing pedagogy, culture, and race, and it is this eclecticism that both challenges the reader and opens new possibilities for dialogue about the discursive and material dominance of whiteness.

This study examines the relationship between patterns of cognitive self-regulatory activities and the quality of texts produced by adolescent struggling writers ( N = 51). A think-aloud study was conducted involving analyses of self-regulatory activities concerning planning, formulating, monitoring, revising, and evaluating. The study shows that the writing processes of adolescent struggling writers have much in common with “knowledge telling” as defined by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987). Nevertheless, there are interesting differences among the individual patterns. First, it appears that adolescent struggling writers who put more effort in planning and formulation succeed in writing better texts than do their peers. Furthermore, self-regulation of these better-achieving writers is quite varied in comparison to the others. Therefore, it seems that within this group of struggling writers, self-regulation does make a difference for the quality of texts produced. Consequently, some recommendations can be made for the stimulation of diverse self-regulatory activities in writing education for this special group of students.

Interests and Opportunities appears at a critical moment in university writing instruction, a moment when many colleges and universities are relegating the task of basic writing instruction to two-...

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

A significant percentage of students who attend secondary schools in the United States do not acquire the basic writing skills required to gain admission to four-year colleges and universities. In the present study, participants were 41 low-income, multi-ethnic 12th-grade students, 19 of whom received instruction on specific genre features for writing college admission essays. The other 22 12th-grade students formed the comparison group and received instruction as usual in their regular English class (mostly on literary analysis). The students who received instruction on genre features of the college admission essay scored higher on a rubric-based rating of the pre and post test essay writing and on writing self-efficacy surveys associated with the genre. Findings yielded from this study point to the merit of using a features-based genre instructional approach to teaching college admission essays to low-income, multi-ethnic high school students.

Reviewed are Basic Writing by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk; Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960 by Kelly Ritter; The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley; and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction by Shannon Carter.

Henry, Hilst and Fox argue for expanding basic writing to include multimodal communications and digital literacies alongside print-based literacies. After defining key terms related to multimodal composition, the authors describe teaching and learning strategies related to visual and oral/aural communication modalities.

Alexander, Powell and Green explore ways in which traditional, nontraditional, and basic writing students view the affordances (potentials and limitations) of multimodal composition. These potentials include layering, implicit persuasion, audience awareness, creativity, and affective appeals, and the limitation of a lack of a clear thesis. In conclusion, the authors offer pedagogical considerations for instructors who assign multimodal composition in their classrooms.

Basic writing students' photo essays demonstrate that the multimodal composition process affords opportunities to participate in engaging conversations about writing. The authors argue that the incorporation of multimodal assignments in the basic writing classroom promotes both digital and print literacies while fostering awareness of students' own writing processes.

Booth and Spina-Caza argue that because video is so widely used as a communication tool, it should be incorporated into the composition classroom. Guidelines for teaching and writing with video are presented along with suggested resources for basic writing instructors.

Leary describes an anthologizing assignment that involves collecting and arranging thematically related texts. Students also compose introductions for a complete class-generated publication. The author concludes that this form of “macrocomposition” allows basic writers to participate in discourse about the components of good writing and helps them assert social and literary agency normally reserved for published writers.

Lay examines the role of multimodal composition in influencing basic writers’ perspective on writing and fostering their agency in and facility with composing. The author concludes that opportunities for multimodality in the basic writing classroom help students to both challenge traditional forms they may mistrust, articulate an individual understanding of composing as a process and successfully complete assignments in a variety of rhetorical modes.

Shapiro describes challenges instructors confront when designing multimodal basic writing coursework while commenting on benefits afforded to students. Drawing on her teaching experiences in basic writing and Upward Bound classes, she offers sample assignments and provides a framework for creating curricula based on multimodal, academic and home literacies. Book Review: Shimmering Literacies

This profile articulates the authors’ response to a statewide mandate to eliminate “remedial” writing instruction at four-year public universities, including their own. The profile describes the difficulties the authors faced in responding to this initiative, given the context of their regional comprehensive university and its specific challenges with retention and student success, and discusses their revision of the university’s writing program. The changes the authors made—eliminating a non-credit basic writing course and creating a credit-bearing basic writing course; instituting guided self-placement; and developing a flexible, WPA-outcomes based writing curriculum—have led to improved satisfaction, success, and retention rates among basic writers at their institution.

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

Challenging the thesis of Stanley Fish’s recent book Save the World on Your Own Time, the author argues that political awareness was vital to the development of a productive basic writing pedagogy, and that composition teachers can responsibly work from their own political values in the classroom.

In the tradition of work by Shaughnessy (1977) and Bartholomae (1980) applying concepts from second language acquisition research to developing writing, we explore the commonalities of L1 and L2 writers on the specific level of linguistic choices needed to order information within and across sentence boundaries. We propose that many of the kinds of constructions in L1 and L2 writing most difficult to categorize, labeled as errors, are in structures that are, from the writers’ perspective, principled attempts to meet their obligation of managing information. We examine 90 essays written by college students, 60 by native speakers, and 30 by nonnative speakers, and identify 360 non-target-like structures that are attempts to manage information. There are similarities in number and type of these constructions used by L1 and L2 developing writers.

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.

The Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is a deeply integrated model for writing programs, bringing together the writing center, first-year writing, basic writing, professional development activities, graduate coursework, and research activities to re-imagine and support twenty-first-century literacies. What is unique about CLiC is not merely the extent of this integration but the non-traditional populations from which research and best practices emerge: The vast majority of our undergraduates are first-generation college students.This webtext discusses the need for programs like this one as well as the specific steps we have taken to develop CLiC (and why). It includes video, audio, web, and text-based media elements.

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a preliminary step in describing and understanding this transformative experience. The differences between the prison writing teachers and the teachers Shaughnessy describes illuminates how much the field of composition has grown in the last forty years. The interviews with these six teachers speak to the experiences of teachers in community outreach teaching situations and may be a step in understanding and articulating these experiences.