Presents a developmental perspective on text construction, understood as managing information within and across sentence boundaries. Claims that the systematicity in non-standard constructions in basic writer's texts reflects student awareness of three obligatory areas of information management in texts: topic management, reference tracking, and…

This paper discuses a "basic" writing pilot program using portfolio-based instruction in two-year college English courses at the St. Louis Community College at Forest Park (Missouri). The first section of the paper offers a comprehensive overview of the benefits of portfolio-based instruction to students, teachers, and the…

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…

Discusses how and why a pedagogy of overt comparison between students' home language (vernacular dialects of English) and school language (standard English) helps students learn the more global features of academic writing and the more sentenced-level features of Standard English. Outlines a pedagogy of overt comparison. Notes it motivates…

Students from the ages of 13 or 14 onward need to know the "colours of words" which can let them live fully in the rainbow of life, thus eliminating student fears associated with written language and of being pawns of those who have the power of words, especially written words. Colour coding the eight basic types of work that words can…