In her recent "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" ("TETYC") article, Denise Marchionda argues for a grading system in her first-year writing course that turns over responsibility to students for earning grades. The approach, which she calls "the point-by-point grading system," is a variation on a contract grading approach in which each…

The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that teachers should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but they cannot help others until they learn to help themselves by reflecting on their own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and…

Almost all of the author's community college students feel self-conscious about their vocabulary. She thinks that their resistance to expanding their vocabulary has many tangled roots: sometimes the students seem nervous about what they leave behind as they notch their vocabulary up to a more formal, college level. This article discusses how the…

The authors are faculty in history and English, respectively, at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York. What their students want and need, and what the institution's role in the community should be, remain open questions, with policy implications at the departmental, college, city, and even national level. Indeed, President Obama…

This essay is about the process of discovering and trying to help an exceptional student who was grappling with issues of real-life violence and incarceration and the desire to articulate their meaning to his life through writing. It describes how this student empowered himself to reflect on and deconstruct the meaning of his incarceration and how…

At the beginning of each school year, the Languages and Humanities Division at Chandler-Gilbert Community College (CGCC) meets to discuss first-year composition matters. Faculty leave the workshop renewed by the collaboration and buoyed by the promise and potential of a new semester. Yet, when classes actually begin, faculty may find that they are…

Describes successful teaching tips for writing instruction from six teachers. (SR)

Describes two writing assignments for basic writers (synthesizing influences from Mike Rose and David Bartholomae) in which students perform complex thinking and writing tasks while writing about their own experiences and those of fictional characters similar to themselves. (SR)

Reviews the arguments for and against teaching the traditional five-paragraph essay model. Describes a teaching approach in which students critically examine these arguments while learning the principle features of the five-paragraph essay. (SR)

Presents five activities: (1) transforming--requires that a student put aside a first draft and create a new piece on the same subject in a different genre; (2) meaningless words--encourages deleting unnecessary words; (3) group work; (4) definitions quiz; and (5) audience, synthesis, and the thematic analysis--considering these three when writing…

Describes how one English teacher used a method of teaching letter writing to foster students' communication and thinking skills. Outlines a method which involves students dually as both consumer complainant and company representative responding to the complaints. Claims that such a process enhances student learning. (HB)

Describes a writing exercise with the "Oxford English Dictionary" that teaches students about research and attention to detail. Describes how the exercise, which involves the student in a set of serial tasks, makes students comfortable with the OED, teaches them how to extract full details of any word, and teaches students to take…

Describes an approach to teaching a literature-based first-year composition course that allows students to read poetry and understand it, which in turn helps them to become better writers. Outlines class activities and writing assignments that foster independent thinking and personal writing, finally leading to essays. (HB)

Offers 11 classroom tips from teachers for a variety of activities, including fictional movie reviews, haiku writing, questions to develop student journals, handouts, rewriting stories, and a "dirty trick" to get better research topics. (SR)

This paper presents an easy and free online tool that has visually enhanced teachers' writing-response pedagogy and helped their students comprehend their composing. Create a Graph is a free and intuitive online data-graphing program developed by the National Center for Education Statistics. In three clicks a visual depiction of weaknesses or…