This article argues the importance of designing writing placement procedures that support linguistic diversity at community colleges. Using data on community college writing programs and student demographics at an urban community college, it examines prevailing structures of ESL and developmental writing programs at two-year schools and identifies…

This article writes the histories of CUNY Open Admissions and hiphop toward each other, illuminating both. Bringing Open Admissions to bear on hiphop history helps us see that, while historians locate the birth of hiphop culture in a 1970s New York gutted by divestment and displacement, in fact the decade before hiphop's birth was characterized by…

Scholars such as Diane Kelly-Riley and Patricia Bizzell have argued that the student writing feature most likely to place a student into a basic writing course is the presence of dialect other than standard academic English. This essay examines how assessment practices can foster students' diverse languages rather than inhibit them. I conducted a…

Against a Racial Real backdrop, I argue for consciously adopting a sociocultural approach to style in linguistically and racially diverse Basic Writing classrooms. To make this argument, I focus on a multilingual writer named Tejada, who reveals how she had internalized a racialized stereotypical discourse about herself as a minority--a discourse…

This essay describes the process of reassessing our BW program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in order to cultivate a more deliberate, transparent negotiation among stakeholders toward a "transcultural ethos." Informed by Bruce Horner's argument that leading-edge work on language and language difference can take place in BW, we…

David Bleich's exploration of language conflicts in the university in "The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University" helps explain the ongoing struggle over basic writing as between two radically different understandings of language. Progressive educators and writing teachers see language as rhetorical and…

Presents a talk addressing "language issues"--issues of student writers who are not native speakers of English, who are struggling with standard English usage, and/or who are unfamiliar with the conventions of academic discourse. Offers an explanation of what writing-to-learn pedagogy should be and do. (SG)