To writing, painting, drawing, and photography as artistic media, the author would like to add teaching as a creative endeavor as well. Especially in a classroom where English is not the first language for many students, the writing teacher needs to be creative with assignments and activities that address nontraditional ways of learning. Her…

Community college campuses around the United States serve an increasingly diverse student body. A report from the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights highlights this growing trend by outlining a plan to increase racial diversity at four-year institutions by encouraging transfers from community colleges, primarily because community…

To effectively address the needs of second language (L2) learners in college writing courses, many postsecondary institutions, especially those located in cities with high concentrations of immigrants, offer college-level courses for L2 students. Such courses include noncredit English language courses in an intensive English program, developmental…

Contrastive rhetoric studies the writing of second language learners to understand how it is affected by their first language and culture. The field of contrastive rhetoric is as multidimensional as second language writing is complex. It draws on the work of contrastive analysis, anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy, culture studies, translation…

The relevance of English as a Second Language (ESL) courses to the "real world" of college writing is an ongoing issue for those who teach ESL. Ideally, ESL composition classes should help students make connections between what they learn about writing and the ways they might need to write later on in their academic careers. Unfortunately, as with…

In this essay, the author describes her own attempt at incorporating Web 2.0 technology into her teaching: a wiki project that she used in her English as a second language (ESL) composition course. The theme she traces throughout the rest of this essay is the wiki's ability (or inability) to make "connections" of various kinds. Like any text, the…

For years, educators have approached college writing from three distinct pedagogies: composition studies, basic writing, and ESL. But now as these classrooms have diversified, mixed, and blended, separated pedagogies are no longer effective. In other words, these three fields (each with its own journals and conferences) have the same common…