Acceleration reduces the time and/or course sequence in developmental education (DE), allowing students to enroll in gateway courses more quickly and/or co-enroll in the first college-level English course while taking the remedial course (Venezia & Hughes, 2013). Texarkana College (TC) piloted an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) with a 12:1…

The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper's failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation--as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail…

English 1311: Expository English Composition is the first semester course in a two-semester first-year composition (FYC) sequence. Both ENG 1311 and its second-semester counterpart, ENG 1312, are required for all students unless they have transfer credit covering this requirement or place out of one or both of the courses via the College-Level…

A community college composition instructor with 32 years of teaching experience designed a semester-long writing assignment (developed at De Anza College (California) and also used at University of California, Berkeley) in which students compose a personal intellectual history. The assignment is based on several assumptions, including: (1) writing…

In reorganizing its core curriculum, Duquesne University (Pennsylvania) created a course that combined the required freshman composition and speech communication courses. A two-term pilot course offered eight hours of credit, meeting for one hour three times a week and for a two hour lab once a week. Oral readings were assigned in order to help…