While understanding the concept of audience is an important step in learning to write, few studies have explored how student writers conceptualize audience in academic and nonacademic settings. This dissertation explores how college students enrolled in a first-year composition course conceptualize and operationalize audience and examines how the…

This dissertation considers the roles that Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) play (and the strategies that they use) in First Year Composition (FYC) programs to promote transformative professional knowledge. This study demonstrates how WPAs not only do the work of translating professional knowledge in Composition's largest and most visible…

Transfer-focused pedagogies like Writing about Writing (WAW) or Teaching for Transfer (TFT) have claimed to better facilitate transfer of writing knowledge from first-year composition (FYC) courses. These pedagogies have emerged alongside research indicating that students in upper-level writing intensive courses often do not transfer FYC…

With sustainability becoming a familiar concept in society, higher education institutions have also started playing a more active role in this field, showing an increasing interest in students' comprehension of sustainability. This interest has led to the need for developing methods of assessing students' sustainability knowledge, as observed in…

Contract cheating, or students outsourcing their assignments to be completed by others, has emerged as a significant threat to academic integrity in higher education institutions around the world. During the COVID-19, when traditional face-to-face instruction became unsustainable, the number of contract cheating students increased dramatically.…

The study investigates the perceptions of first-year writing faculty of how their students develop information literacy (IL). The authors conducted 16 semi-structured interviews and analyzed them using a qualitative inductive coding method. The study contributes a close and nuanced understanding of faculty perceptions of IL learning to a…

This narrative essay describes a basic writing instructor's engagement with student confusion in a hybrid Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) course. The story examines the ways confusion can mark sites of engagement for students and teachers and how ALP courses, in particular, might mediate effective (and ineffective) forms of confusion.

Indiana University of Pennsylvania's (IUP) course catalogue describes English 101: Composition I as a first-year writing course in which students use a variety of resources--including but not limited to memory, observation, critical reading and viewing, analysis, and reflection--and a focus on writing process to create projects in a variety of…

There are several technological tools which aim to support first year students' challenges, especially when it comes to academic writing. This paper analyses one of these tools, Wiley's AssignMentor. The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework was used to systematise this analysis. The paper showed an alignment between the tools'…

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…

At three different institutions, public and private, in varying roles, I have found the very particular problem of how to inform micro-level classroom practices with macro-level disciplinary knowledge to be centrally important to our field's development and our students' learning--and singularly difficult to overcome. In this program profile, I…

Through the use of a case study, this article explores the role of talk in underprepared students' acquisition of academic discourse. Conversation analysis as a linguistic framework is used to examine the interactions of students participating in a small writing group. Tracing the progress of one student's paper, I explore how students'…