This article draws on a qualitative study of Chinese international undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Throughout, I argue that these students' FYW experiences compel BW instructors and WPAs to reevaluate pedagogies long thought to empower underrepresented students, ones rooted in our encounters since Open Admissions…

This article discusses a method of grammar feedback in Basic Writing that asks students to determine the extent of grammar feedback the instructor provides on their writing. Student-directed grammar feedback acknowledges students' agency and ownership of their own languaging and aligns with translingual writing pedagogy. Drawing on students'…

According to sociocultural theory (SCT), corrective feedback (CF) entails a negotiation process whereby writing instructors support second language (L2) writers in self-correction and provide a level of guidance needed for writers to actively engage in revision tasks (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994). Drawing on SCT, this collaborative self-study…

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…

The few studies that deal with machine translation (MT) as a language learning tool focus on its use by advanced learners, never by beginners. Yet, freely available MT engines (i.e. Google Translate) and MT-related web initiatives (i.e. Gabble-on.com) position themselves to cater precisely to the needs of learners with a limited command of a…

The early success of the revised ESL literacy development curriculum for international undergraduates at a large Midwestern university suggests that a curriculum which integrates reading and writing activity around meaning-making tasks with texts and focuses on fluency before accuracy is preferable to a skill-based curriculum. Support for this…

This report examines the importance and efficacy of oral language, literacy, mathematics, and science preschool curricula and how these curricula can be improved through alignment with research on early childhood development and learning. Detailed, research-driven recommendations are presented for what preschool-aged children should be learning in…

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…

Uses student essays to illustrate the linguistic variations that many basic writing students bring to the academy and then offers some insights from second language acquisition and literacy studies that may help writing specialists enhance pedagogical practice to better serve these students. (SG)

Examines the qualities and frequency of episodes of concurrent metalinguistic and ideational thinking reported verbally by second-language learners while they composed. Finds frequencies of thinking episodes is significantly related to learners' writing expertise in their mother tongue. Argues for integrating the notion of comprehensible output…

This paper discusses the similarities in the difficulties that developmental writers and non-native English speakers/writers bring to the classroom and how this can influence instructors' choices of pedagogical strategies. The paper proposes a method of teaching that encourages teacher comfort with basic writing such that student work remains the…

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…