Since high school students are failing to master writing proficiency, developmental writing programs at the college level have become increasingly necessary. This article explains the lack of readiness with which students are entering college and the workplace, examines the reasons students are having trouble writing, and describes elements of…

Some teaching strategies grow out of the curricula educators inherit or develop through professional reading; others originate in the aromatic humus of their autobiographies. This article presents a proposal that has its origins in the latter. The author recognized that what delights her in prose or poetry is the figurative language a writer uses…

In basic writing classrooms and scholarship, reading too often remains invisible; neither research nor established practice provides tangible activities to support reading and connect it to writing. This article documents a search for structured, scaffolded, low-stakes reading activities, a search that moves off the college campus and into the…

Presents a developmental perspective on text construction, understood as managing information within and across sentence boundaries. Claims that the systematicity in non-standard constructions in basic writer's texts reflects student awareness of three obligatory areas of information management in texts: topic management, reference tracking, and…

Generally, students in vocational and technical colleges are in writing classes because they must be, not because they want to be. As a rule, students in basic composition classes have been more or less continually exposed to writing classes since middle school where they been asked to keep journals, read articles and short stories, and write…

Relates how the author came into a generally contentious classroom of eleventh-grade developmental English students and how it became a place of cooperative reading and writing and critiquing through a democratic approach and a three-week project in which students wrote a fictional story via letter writing. Notes student's involvement and…

This paper discuses a "basic" writing pilot program using portfolio-based instruction in two-year college English courses at the St. Louis Community College at Forest Park (Missouri). The first section of the paper offers a comprehensive overview of the benefits of portfolio-based instruction to students, teachers, and the…

A seven-credit-hour block course, which includes Public Speaking (three institutional credits), Basic Writing (three program credits), and Reading (one program credit) was created at Murray State University to give at-risk freshmen an opportunity to take a university credit course (Public Speaking) while strengthening their reading and writing…

Describes two different experiments at De Anza College which illustrate coordinated teaching, a concept in which a group of faculty volunteer to work together for better instruction within the context of an existing program, maintaining their usual approaches to teaching a course, but allowing for collegial effort, some common work, and…

Discusses principles about writing instruction that emerged from mainstreaming basic writers in first-year composition at California State University, Chico: (1) students learn college writing by being in the context of college writing, not some other context; and (2) literacy learning does not come in discreet levels. Describes how writers in…

Discusses how and why a pedagogy of overt comparison between students' home language (vernacular dialects of English) and school language (standard English) helps students learn the more global features of academic writing and the more sentenced-level features of Standard English. Outlines a pedagogy of overt comparison. Notes it motivates…

For many years, Arizona State University (ASU) allowed its basic writers into its standard English (ENG) 101 course, only after they took ENG 071, a remedial class offered by a local community college. However, it soon became obvious to English Department faculty that the remedial grammar-focused class was not giving this group of students the…

Contends that student writing compositions and instructor feedback offer special benefits when rendered orally via audiocassette. Promotes a "reader-based" writing sensibility in students, who read their work onto cassette tape, and allows greater flexibility in grading and critiquing for instructors, who return the tape with detailed comments.…