This article shares our experience designing and deploying writing assessment in English Composition I: Achieving Expertise, the first-ever first-year writing Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We argue that writing assessment can be effectively adapted to the MOOC environment and that doing so reaffirms the importance of mixed-methods approaches to writing assessment and drives writing assessment toward a more individualized,learner-driven, and learner-autonomous paradigm.

This article introduces the idea of grammar agreements as a way to offer a more “finely tuned approach” to grammar feedback in the L2 classroom (Ferris, Liu, Sinha, & Senna, p. 307). These agreements offer students options for how the teacher will respond to writing done in their first-year composition classes. The authors offer suggestions for both why grammar agreements are a useful tool in the L2 writing classroom (and possibly beyond) and how to implement grammar agreements effectively.

Metacognition is a typical learning outcome in composition courses, but providing feedback on low-stakes reflective writing and assessing highstakes reflective writing are complex tasks that warrant more attention in the literature. Consequently, this article explores how the assignment of and response to low-stakes reflective writing can provide effective scaffolding to higher-stakes reflective writing tasks. We present an example of our strategy for response through one instructor’s experience with responding to her first-year composition student’s low-stakes reflective writing. Ultimately, we call for more research on responding to reflective writing that will ensure the valid and reliable assessment of metacognition in composition courses.

In addition to other unfortunate circumstances, teacher response that comes in the form of negative, generic, and unintelligible commentary causes students to become alienated from writing. This problematic response often results from the lack of supportive student-centered response pedagogies within the first-year composition classroom. In an attempt to prevent additional writerly estrangement and to undo students’ isolation from the writing process, this article explores Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication theory as a potential framework for a dialogic, compassionate writing response pedagogy.

This study presents a piloted second language (L2) writing tutor (L2WT) internship program as a way to provide supplemental, sustained writing fellow- style support to L2 writers and classroom teachers in multilingual firstyear composition (FYC) courses in a large U.S. university within the span of one semester. The major facet of the internship program was the tutors’ response to student writing in a one-to-one context for each major essay assignment. The presence and needs of second language writing students in the writing classroom have been clearly articulated in relevant research, but what is less known is how to devise successful methods of support that are both helpful and economical. The author provides evidence that students in L2WT-mediated classes earned higher grades and that the L2WT internship program was perceived as valuable for all parties involved: L2 writers, L2 writing teachers, and the tutors themselves. Additionally, the for-credit internship is a cost-effective option for writing programs without the funding to implement a large-scale writing fellows program. Implications for future offerings of the fellow-style internship, as well as suggestions for how to implement this program in additional contexts, are provided.

Reviews Janet Downie, At the Limits ofArt: A Literary Study ofAelius Aristides' Hieroi Logoi New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. pp. 1-223. ISBN 9780199924875 In this book Janet Downie displays an expert and intimate understand­ ing of Aelius Aristides, the eccentric second-century rhetor from Asia Minor. She focuses in particular on his Hieroi logoi (HL) and the relationship between religion and rhetoric. In his concern with the divine, Aristides pushed the rhetoric of religion to its limits. Asclepius was his inspiration, his teacher, and, to some degree, his co-author, and was at the center of the HL, which Aristides considered the fulfillment of his obligation to this god. Yet the real protagonist of the work is Aristides with his failing body, his dreams, his cures, his performances, and his powerful self-assertion. Downie argues that Aristides' purpose is rhetorical, and he uses his narrative of divine healing to create a portrait of himself as a professional rhetor. Whether Aristides succeeded in this purpose, and was able to commu­ nicate his vision to his audience is a question which persists throughout the book, but, basically, cannot be solved. No reaction from Aristides' contempo­ rary audience has been preserved. It is puzzling that in his Lives ofthe Sophists Philostratus recognized the rhetor's craft but did not mention the religious character of his rhetoric, ignored the presence of Asclepius, and dismissed Aristides' talent because of his lack of improvisation. Apart from Libanius and some of his friends in the fourth century, later reception of Aristides and the HL was decidedly cool, and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centu­ ries, utterly disdainful. Downie attributes this to the fact that the HL were not read in conjunction with the rest of Aristides' work. It is uncertain whether she is right, or if generations of readers simply considered the work too eccentric and odd. A merit of Downie's book, in any case, is that it puts the HL in dialogue with all Aristides' writings, his orations and Hymns in particular, so that the whole of this challenging author is illuminated. One of the difficulties in approaching the HL as a coherent literary work is the discontinuity in its style. Book 1 is in diary form, and books 2-5 proceed thematically and have narrative aims. With great literary sensibility, Downie shows that the different styles derive from various and deliberate layers of composition intended to throw into high relief the combination of the divine voice with the human voice. Aristides' dreams are many and so vivid that Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIV, Issue 1, pp. 106-118. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. © 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.20l6.34.l.l0b. Reviews 107 they make an impact on the reader. Discontinuity is typical of dreams and Downie links the unique language of dreams to Aristides' desire to suggest dreaming as a cognitiv e process. This reviewer does wish that Downie had taken briefly into account the dreams of the sons of Glaukias in Ptolemaic Memphis who lived and slept in the temple of Sarapis. Their words and expressions on papyri were those of common people and so they could have prov ided a useful comparison. Undoubtedly' the most disconcerting parts of the HL are those in which the author appears to further weaken his body by endless vomiting or dipping in frigid waters. Aristides knew7 contemporary medicine and the medical tradi­ tion and sometimes first consulted doctors who appear as rivals of Asclepius who triumphs at the end. Downie rightly remarks that this is the first instance in which an author revealed the illnesses and cures he personally experienced. Yet, we can surmise that these passages were the most repulsive to his contemporaries and may hav e been the cause of their disregard of the whole work. While Aristides sometimes is a patient passive in the hands of his doc­ tors and Asclepius, at times he has...

This article argues for the importance of teaching reading in first-year composition courses within a metacognitive framework called mindful reading. Crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy practices that students can transfer into other courses and contexts, this framework encourages students to actively reflect on a range of reading practices in order to become more knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read. This work is intended to prepare students to successfully engage with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their postsecondary academic careers and beyond.

Entering college students are profoundly disturbed when placed in courses labeled “basic,” “developmental,” or “remedial.” Discouraged and often faced with pressing life problems, many of these students drop out of college before ever reaching first-year composition. Beginning in 2007, the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) renamed and reframed their basic writing program as ALP (the Accelerated Learning Program). Students enrolled in ALP take regular, credit-bearing composition along with a writing workshop taught by the same teacher and designed to help them succeed in the comp course. Now, ten years later, ALP has enabled thousands of students at CCBC to move into the college mainstream in a timely and cost-effective fashion. Efforts to disseminate the program have been wide-ranging and successful. Currently, the ALP model has been implemented at approximately 240 campuses nationwide. In this essay, I argue that with the widespread implementation of innovative, student-centered programs such as ALP, Stretch, and writing studios, the time has finally come to end remediation as we know it.

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.

As Brian Huot and Ellen E. Schendel assert, when assessment has more than validation in mind, it “can become a means for proactive change” (208). In response to this idea of assessment as an optimistic and opportunistic enterprise, this article describes how the structural design of our “equal opportunity” writing program and our faculty-led assessment process work symbiotically to sustain, enhance and “revision” the curriculum and pedagogy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, first-year writing program. Our writing program strives to offer all students at the college a consistent and equivalent writing experience, regardless of what semester or in what section they enroll, as well as a coherent trajectory, where students encounter similar learning processes and literacy tasks throughout the course sequence. To ensure this consistency and coherence, our programmatic stakeholders designed program assessment to have direct impact on classroom learning by following multiple formative and summative assessments in an inquiry-based practice driven by local curricular contexts. In profiling the quid pro quo between writing program design and its accompanying assessment efforts, we demonstrate how program structure enables useful, progressive assessment, and, conversely, how assessment continuously informs and improves the infrastructures of pedagogy and curriculum in the writing classroom.

Multimodal pedagogy is increasingly accepted among composition scholars. However, putting such pedagogy into practice presents significant challenges. In this profile of Washington State University’s first-year composition program, we suggest a multi-vocal and multi-theoretical approach to addressing the challenges of multimodal pedagogy. Patricia Ericsson, the director of composition, illustrates how theories of agency are central to the integration of multimodality. Elizabeth Sue Edwards, a graduate teaching assistant, explores negotiating departmental standards and implementing multimodal assignments. Tialitha Michelle Macklin, also a graduate teaching assistant, discusses her journey from rejecting multimodal assignments to embracing them as an integral element of her pedagogy. And Leeann Downing Hunter, a non-tenure-track faculty member, approaches the challenge through the lens of adaptability. We believe that this multi-vocal approach to building a multimodal composition program offers: (1) a foundation for other writing programs to adapt and build upon; (2) an alternative to traditional approaches that rely on single theories and single leaders; and (3) a reconstitution of how the university works, integrating stakeholder voices from administrators to students themselves.

This program profile describes recent changes to the process for preparing graduate teaching instructors (GTAs) in North Carolina State University’s first-year writing program. The authors—one a non-tenure-track faculty member and the other a tenure-track faculty member—describe the philosophical, ethical, and practical concerns in scaling teacher preparation to accommodate rapidly growing cohorts of MA and MFA GTAs. By providing an example of cross-tier collaboration, the authors propose an approach to GTA preparation that takes into account that many of these novice teachers will begin their teaching careers as contingent faculty colleagues.

This article proposes a “pedagogy of riffing” and examines how satire and some earlier forms of metacommentary can help first-year composition students appreciate the mediated nature of contemporary current-events discourse. Beginning with comic news and working back to those pioneers of cultural riffing, Mystery Science Theater 3000 , this article examines the nexus of rhetorical awareness, citizenship, and riffing. I argue that using forms of metacommentary, situated within a pedagogy of riffing, helps students to locate themselves in the larger discussion of politics and informed citizenship.

Recent research in writing studies has highlighted meta-awareness as valuable for student learning in courses such as first-year writing (FYW); however, meta-awareness needs to be further theorized and its components identified. In this article, I draw on a case study of six students in two FYW courses that is informed by Gregory Schraw’s model of metacognition and Anthony Giddens’s theory of practical and discursive consciousness to outline four writing/rhetorical concepts within which meta-awareness about composition is observable. These concepts include 1) process, 2) techniques, 3) rhetoric, and 4) intercomparativity, and they provide a preliminary framework for meta-awareness about composition that others might expand upon as we continue to build knowledge of how writers learn.

Comics—both digital and print—increasingly make their way to the classroom. Scholars in the field have illustrated the pedagogical value of comics, but there remains little discussion as of yet about how comics can inform critical literacy, a necessary skill for twenty-first-century communication. Here the authors discuss an approach to first-year composition that argues for using comics, like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home , as an avenue for grappling with critical literacy. This classroom activity was a part of a larger assignment sequence where students were asked to compose web-based literature reviews that incorporated multimodality. These literature reviews challenged students to incorporate multiple viewpoints into their essays, and critically discussing comics proved to be an effective method for fostering this critical literacy.

In addition to teaching research and writing skills, First-Year Composition classes are well situated to help students develop strategies for managing stress and increasing well-being. I describe an assignment sequence in which students interview others from three generations about topics related to happiness and well-being, analyze shared transcripts, and present their findings in two genres. Beyond providing instruction in research methods, academic writing, and multimodal composing for non-academic audiences, this sequence supports the five elements of authentic well-being outlined by positive psychologist Martin Seligman: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and purpose, and accomplishment. These assignments and related course content foster emotional literacy by prompting students to approach happiness and well-being as academic subjects and to develop practical strategies for implementing what they’ve learned.

Drawing on results from a survey distributed nationally through the WPA and WCenter listservs, we examine the affective aspect of failure in teachers’ responses to student writing, aiming to pinpoint teachers’ perceptions of why students fail. Overall, we posit that writing studies needs to pay closer attention to teachers’ emotional responses to student failure. This article represents a step in that direction.

In this essay, the author reflects on her experiences while researching composition instructors’ emotional responses to plagiarism. The research found that instructors faced a variety of complex and competing feelings when students plagiarized, and those responses threatened to upset relationships, power structures, and professional identities in the classroom. The author considers how and why her own emotional labor was altered in light of these findings and what this might suggest about the need for increased professional conversation in our discipline regarding the impact of emotions in the writing classroom.

Four texts are reviewed that exemplify an important strand of writing center scholarship focused on power dynamics and identity politics in literacy teaching and learning, particularly but not exclusively within college writing centers. Each text takes up the entrenched problem of oppression and injustice toward students identified as being minority by institutional standards; each addresses possibilities for more productive, humane, and inclusive practice. Considered alongside scholarship by authors participating in this January's symposium issue and others concerned with disrupting monolingual, monocultural ideologies and institutionalized oppression, these texts add significantly to the conversation on theory and practice of critical literacy teaching and learning.

This article explores the advantages of pairing disability studies with the study of rhetoric/composition in the first-year seminar classroom. Examining the ways in which both disability studies and rhetoric interrogate issues of construction, it argues that the two fields mutually reinforce one another when taught together since they both prioritize critical thinking, close reading, and careful argumentation. This article offers a number of specific examples of in-class activities, writing assignments, and possible texts for a class that merges disability studies and composition. In addition, it discusses the value of using superpowers as a context for the study of disability in a first-year seminar, arguing that superpowers provide a unique access point for engaging disability while also encouraging students to more carefully examine a wide variety of cultural texts.

Through genre awareness, first-year writing students compose a book review to practice habits of mind.

This study reports on student comprehension of plagiarism and plagiarism avoidance before and after the first-year composition course.

Based on research conducted at Wilbur Wright College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, this article explores the strategies, methods, and theoretical frameworks used by English instructors to teach reading-writing connections in developmental and credit-level writing courses.

The essay reports the findings of a study of 911 students’ academic outcomes in relation to their placement profiles and a closer, qualitative analysis of 54 participating

Reviewed are: Literacy as Translingual Practice: Between Communities and Classrooms A. Suresh Canagarajah, editor Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations A. Suresh Canagarajah Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies Scott Wible Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African AmericanLiteracy Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barrett, Y’Shanda Young-Rivera, and Kim Brian Lovejoy

In this article, I turn to a grounded theory study that examines the experiences of students participating in an individual project-based FYW course, exploring up close the exploits,—practices, and products of one student “writing to assemble.” I question pedagogy stayed to theory that would treat writing as primarily a technology of representation, and in its place—introduce the concept of “writing as assemblage.” Positing a theory of the writing space that underscores writing’s more generative qualities, I call for a new definition of proficiency—for all manner of first-year writing courses.

We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is “simplistic in method and impoverished in content” by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a result of her own insistence on disciplinary expertise: she had great difficulty recruiting faculty from other disciplines to teach first-year writing classes. This article suggests a solution to this problem, a strategic disingenuousness derived from the strategy developed by popular sentimental women authors of nineteenth-century America to counter the disciplinary expertise of professional male orators and rhetoricians, who looked down on the untrained speaker. The stance of strategic disingenuousness that this article advocates is more radical than the denial of expertise touted by recent scholarship in WAC and WID: it requires WPAs to withhold their expertise in the absence of any assurancethat the faculty they are training already have within themselves the knowledge they need to teach writing. An admittedly inefficient and often exasperating stance, it nonetheless represents a way for WPAs to entice faculty to teach writing and build a strong community with them.

magine a department where there is only one black professor, a common occurrence across universities and colleges today.She is the first black professor in the history of the department there and certainly the first to be tenured.After many years, she finally sees a graduate student complete her dissertation, a young black woman who is also amongst the first black females to graduate with a doctorate from this program.And while there are plenty of ancestors and kinfolk across states, countries, and even continents celebrating this achievement, some of the white faculty are not as ecstatic.In fact, a few white junior professors, self-proclaimed feminists who teach first year writing, both stunningly under-achieving in their fields, begin to tell people that the professor wrote the dissertation for this black female graduate student, with the full support of staff/administration in spreading this Untruth.In the parlay of black youth culture, yes, we can call that: haters gon hate.While fully acknowledging all that hateration, let's also dig deeper.It would seem that any researcher or scholar in the academy would know that you cannot possibly present at conferences, give keynote addresses, publish your own articles, review other articles for peer-reviewed journals, work on your own book manuscripts, review other people's manuscripts and books in print, work on grant-funded projects, and then also write someone else's dissertation for them.It seems safe to say that it is a huge task to even make time to read drafts of advisees' dissertations.This event is just one of many that show how white faculty and staff can be deeply invested in the illogic of their racism.This story, along with the many other stories that I will tell here, will serve not as micro-instances of campus racism but as macro-pictures of political life in American universities.I intend for these stories to offer a context for the ways in which we must understand and rupture whiteness, racial violence, and the institutional racism of our disciplinary constructs in composition-rhetoric as central to the political work we must do.

This article situates the teaching of first- and second-semester college writing courses in relation to current discussions about the Common Core State Standards Initiative, competency-based education, the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing,” the “WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition,” and vertical college writing curricula.

Faculty and writing center tutors bring expertise to writing as practice and process. Yet at many institutions, the two groups work in relative isolation, missing opportunities to learn from each other. In this article, I describe a faculty development initiative in a multidisciplinary writing program that brings together new faculty and experienced undergraduate tutors to workshop instructors’ comments on first-year writing. The purpose of these workshops is to assist faculty in crafting inquiry-driven written responses that pave the way for collaborative faculty-student conferences. By bringing together scholarly conversations on tutor expertise and the role of faculty comments in student learning, I argue for the value of extending partnerships between writing centers and programs. Such accounts are important to the field for challenging what Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls the “writing center grand narrative,” which limits the scope of writing center work by imagining centers primarily as “comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” to the exclusion of lived realities (p. 3). In this case, I describe a writing center where tutors bring their expertise outside the center and into the faculty office, consulting in small groups with faculty with the aim of enriching the quality of instructor feedback in first-year seminars.

Research has shown that in order to facilitate the development of students’ writing, teachers need to cultivate principles of effective feedback. However, revision is a joint process, and for the maximum effectiveness of this process, there should be more than just a giver-receiver relationship with the teacher giving the information and the student receiving it. Instead, students should be actively involved in the revision process by reflecting on and analyzing their own writing and meaningfully responding to teacher feedback. This teaching article describes a technique—Letter to the Reviewer—that facilitates collaboration between the teacher and the student. A Letter to the Reviewer is a memo that students attach to each draft, in which they provide a short reflective note to their reviewer by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their draft and ask for specific feedback on certain elements of the draft. The technique was implemented in two first-year composition classes for multilingual writers in a large university in the Midwest. Teacher observations of student work and students’ self-reports on this technique demonstrated that the letters helped students approach their own writing more analytically, ask the teacher and peers for focused feedback, engage in the collaborative revision process, provide more specific feedback on their classmates’ writing, prepare for writing conferences, and recognize the connection between classroom instruction and their own writing.

This article proposes permaculture, an ecological alternative to industrial agriculture, as a way to design first-year composition and community literacy classes. First, the paper connects permaculture with post-humanism to describe ecological community literacies—the type of knowledge that ecological theorists say we need to navigate the end of the anthropocene. Next, it describes assignments that can lead college students to this knowledge, and finally, it describes actual community literacy projects where college students can lead elementary students through assignments to gain this knowledge.

Strong in theory, rich in history, and farreaching in its implications, Producing Good Citizens will soon become a staple for scholars, activists, and pedagogues alike who are interested in the complicated intersections of literacy and citizenship. In this historicized work, Amy Wan explores three main sites of citizenship training during the 1910s and 1920s-federally-sponsored immigrant Americanization programs, unionsupported worker education training, and college-mandated first-year writing courses. Wan's book starts with a brief introduction to citizenship theory, moves into archival research of each training site, and concludes with applications of her methodology to present anxieties over citizenship, particularly in relation to the Patriot and DREAM Acts. Through her book, Wan complicates citizenship as a discursive construct and demonstrates the limits of what literacy-and citizenship-can do for students as well as "the limitations put upon students by not only the idea of citizenship, but also its legal, political, and cultural boundaries" (178). Wan's powerful, timely argument and her final challenge to educators and scholars alike should not be ignored. Together, Wan invites us to consider what is meant by the invocation of citizenship in the classroom, to analyze the habits of citizenship that are encouraged by our practices, and to connect our citizen-making processes to other more politically and materially situated notions of citizenship.

The renewed interest in personal essays in composition complicates the contested, tricky personal identity negotiations for students and faculty in first-year writing, particularly in manifestations and representations of the body in both the classroom and writing spaces. This is especially complex for minority subjects, including queer students and faculty. Such collections as The Teacher’s Body (edited by Freedman and Holmes) and Professions of Desire (edited by Haggerty and Zimmerman) explore the pedagogical underpinnings of the body, and Ellis Hanson’s essay in the Gay Shame collection (2009) further complicates and interrogates the ways queer bodies are represented and problematized in the classroom. This article explores our own experiences in first-year writing: as students within a mind/body binary exploring through the scaffolding of composition, and as faculty who are increasingly exposed through our body projections in the classroom and depictions of our body and sexuality in an increasingly savvy media in which Google, Facebook, and social networking sites create matrices of identifications and disidentifications that inform our classroom experiences. The article traces the ways our bodies are aligned with cultural norms, and the ways that first-year writing complicates, contests, reifies, or disrupts these norms—for both students and faculty.

In view of the constant bombardment of esoteric theory in all aspects of academic life, and especially in composition studies, what can writing instructors do to help their students in a practical way? This article argues that even before teaching craft, writing instructors must foreground the student’s somatic body, not the culturally constructed, body-based identity or the body of text students produce. To place this emphasis on the body is wholly in line with historical pedagogy, and a return to such an emphasis in contemporary writing classrooms may be instrumental in students overcoming their dread of the writing process. In order to reorient composition instruction and focus on the somatic body, the author looks to contemporary philosopher Richard Shusterman’s oeuvre of somaesthetics, a pragmatic and melioristic body-centered approach to philosophy broadly applicable to the humanities. His project can be liberally applied in the writing classroom, and doing so will help students overcome the consternation associated with writing. Through somaesthetic instruction, students can develop personalized writing rituals and identify aesthetically conducive environments in which to write. Only after establishing the primacy of the students’ mental and physical state, essentially freeing students from the anxiety broadly associated with writing, may writing instructors begin the debate over compositional praxis.

[F]or composition teachers who hope to utilize social media to support student writing, recognition of the rhetorical potential of students’ use of multiple social sites—as active users of not just Facebook, but also Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and others—emerges as a necessary prerequisite to meeting student expertise in rhetoric.

This article presents and illustrates a qualitative research methodology for studies of uptake. It does so by articulating a theoretical framework for qualitative investigations of uptake and detailing a research study designed to invoke and capture students’ uptakes in a first-year writing classroom. The research design sought to make uptake visible by disrupting habitual uptakes and encouraging students to design their own uptakes. The study employed the qualitative research methods of observation, survey, interview, and text analysis to uncover uptake processes and influential factors that inform them. Ultimately, this article argues that a disruptive methodology can provide much needed insight into how individuals take up texts and make use of their discursive resources.

Since Carolyn Miller’s Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has facilitated analysis of how typified rhetorical actions constitute the contexts and communities in which writers write. In first-year writing (FYW) specifically, RGS approaches have focused on macro-level textual constructs, like the audience and evidence expectations of different genres, and have bolstered valuable attention to genre awareness and transfer. In its attention to context and macro-level features, however, RGS has focused less on recurring linguistic patterns in written genres, which has contributed to two gaps in genre-based approaches to FYW: few large-scale analyses of first-year written genres, and little attention to language patterns in genre-based FYW pedagogy and research. This article aims to interrogate these gaps and offer a way beyond them, in three parts. First, it historicizes the institutional separation of U.S. rhetoric-composition and linguistics. Second, it outlines recent pedagogical genre research in RGS and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which together offer valuable insights for approaches to FYW. Finally, it delineates selected observations from a context-informed corpus linguistic analysis of 19,463 FYW argumentative essays that draws on both RGS and EAP genre traditions. The analysis highlights rhetorical cues of the essay prompts (often absent in EAP corpus linguistic research) alongside shared linguistic patterns (often absent in RGS studies). The analysis likewise outlines overall patterns that distinguish FYW from published academic writing. The article closes with implications for pedagogy, research, and assessment.

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction (“I think”) to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices (“we know”).

With distance education on the rise, a new program at the University of New Mexico provides an innovative way to teach first-year composition in a fully online format. The program, called eComp (short for Electronic Composition), insists that instructors receive formal and educational training before working in the model. In addition, the curriculum taught within the first-year writing courses attends to multimodal literacies, and students receive help with their drafts from various sources, including instructional assistants who are tutors embedded in each course shell. This profile describes the program, including the scholarship that informed its design, the pilot project, and results from a small-scale assessment. Furthermore, we discuss future expansion of the program. This program description can serve as a model—in whole or in part—for other English departments when structuring a successful, integrative online program that emphasizes teacher training and multimodal literacies.

The Virtual Workplace Ethnography is a first-year composition assignment that positions students as knowledge makers by requiring them to apply a theoretical lens (“Working Knowledge”) to a video representation of a workplace. The lens provides multiple terms for analysis of workplace behaviors in context, providing a scaffolding for apprentice ethnographers that allows them to take an informed stance on their research. The “virtual” aspect addresses the complex ethical issues raised by ethnography by substituting a fictitious setting for an actual site. The essay explores the challenges of the assignment, offering examples of student texts and student metacommentaries on the work. The essay argues that this assignment addresses longstanding concerns about the challenges of making meaningful writing assignments in FYC and concludes by exploring the potential of the assignment in distance education.

Reviewed are: From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 David Fleming Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era Steve Lamos Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave Pegeen Reichert Powell Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe