The five-paragraph essay is highly controversial, and yet it has also been a useful format for composition. In this essay we explain why, despite its limits, students need to go along with the format to make what use and get what advantage of it. We then demonstrate that valuing the philosophical, historical, cultural, and educational backgrounds…

With support from the California Community College Chancellor's Office, the MMAP Research Team, a team of The Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges (RP Group) conducted a literature review on various assessment measures used for English as a Second Language (ESL) programs to explore effective assessment methods including…

As part of the Community College Research Center's (CCRC) Analysis of Statewide Developmental Education Reform Learning Assessment Study, Wake Technical Community College's partner team believes the recommendation and implications in the CCRC's Developmental Reading and English Assessment in a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership. Working Paper No.…

This article explores the learning experiences of two students in the same college-level English course at Urban Serving Community College (USCC) (pseudonym). The objective was to understand how one student met with success and the other failure despite both successfully completing their developmental English course the semester prior. I observed…

In my work on the college's Committee on Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies, I found that much of the written work done in our community college was based on lower level cognition, requiring none of the assessment or exploration that is emblematic of critical thought in a democracy. Most of the assignments asked students simply to recite…

This article relates the efforts of faculty at one community college to define standards for achievement of two SLOs (critical thinking and effective communication) and to gather and analyze evidence of how well students meet those standards. Faculty from 13 disciplines assessed writing samples from 265 students. We found that, in general,…

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…

Some teaching strategies grow out of the curricula educators inherit or develop through professional reading; others originate in the aromatic humus of their autobiographies. This article presents a proposal that has its origins in the latter. The author recognized that what delights her in prose or poetry is the figurative language a writer uses…

In this article, the author talks about the college writing center, which is a place of political confrontation, where cultural issues involving dialect and values are probed, contested, and negotiated. He suggests a post-process approach to composition--one that ushers writers into a world of exploration and social engagement--one that transcends…

Members of a site of the California Writing Project conducted the study in this article in partnership with a large, urban, low-SES school district where 93% of the students speak English as a second language and 69% are designated Limited English Proficient. Over an eight-year period, a relatively stable group of 55 secondary teachers engaged in…