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…

In the tradition of work by Shaughnessy (1977) and Bartholomae (1980) applying concepts from second language acquisition research to developing writing, we explore the commonalities of L1 and L2 writers on the specific level of linguistic choices needed to order information within and across sentence boundaries. We propose that many of the kinds…

Selected subtests from the Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) were administered to three groups of university students. The groups included students with learning disabilities who received course substitutions for the institution's foreign language requirement, students with learning disabilities who…

This paper reports on a cross-disciplinary study by an L1 compositionist and an applied linguist investigating interrelationships among university basic writing students' responses to linguistic identity labels, their residency statuses, and their preferences for mainstream or multilingual composition. Previous L2 writing research has suggested…

The goal of the study reported in this article is to analyze ways students in the first course of a three-quarter college preparatory sequence in reading and writing write about their experiences in their essays. The student participants were three native speakers of English and three native speakers of Punjabi, who had lived and studied in the…

This article examines writing conference discourse in one English as a Second Language (ESL) basic composition course. The study is based on a 25,000-word corpus of 10 writing conference interactions between the instructor and seven students. Through a microlevel analysis, the authors demonstrate how and to what degree the writing conference can…