This paper reports the findings of a study of student writing that assessed the skill needs of a cohort of developmental writing students enrolled in a co-requisite composition course at a community college that is part of the City University of New York (CUNY). This credit-bearing course fulfills the first half of the required composition…

This descriptive study examined differences in children's text production as a function of the advanced planning strategies they used. A sample of 117 third-grade children engaged in independent advanced planning and then composed a compare-and-contrast essay both before and after receiving a six-week text production fluency intervention. Analyses…

The purpose of the study was to validate a writing motivation questionnaire that consists of four scales for first-year college writers--students with low writing skills in basic writing classes and students in typical first-year composition (FYC)--to investigate differences between these two groups and to examine the relationship of motivational…

This paper presents a qualitative study that used student interviews to investigate the influence of non-cognitive barriers on developmental student success in a corequisite first-year composition course that was offered on line following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students answered open-ended questions about their previous educational…

Latinx students are a growing demographic in postsecondary English classes, but the majority of research on them and on the faculty who teach them is based in the US Southwest at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The purpose of this study is to describe some of the pedagogical and extracurricular considerations of faculty who teach Latinx students in…

Despite the push for all institutions of higher learning to embrace a corequisite model for writing instruction, there is limited evidence that suggests this model is desirable for all students. This study seeks to expand our understanding of the characteristics of students enrolled in Basic Writing at a 4-year comprehensive university, and the…

A consistent challenge of implementing blended learning is the support that students should receive when using online courseware outside of class time. For blended learning to be successful in terms of student learning, the online courseware would need to be able to support the learning of students outside of class time. An interactive, digital…

This research was aimed at fostering students' idea generating abilities via the implementation of pre-writing strategies. The study adopted an action research design. The first phase involved problem identification and causes of the problems through focus group discussion and classroom observation. After identifying the challenges, systematically…

Many developmental writing courses in colleges focus on teaching students isolated skills, with little emphasis on how such skills are applicable to the actual process of writing. This article focuses on capturing the perspectives of students enrolled in a developmental writing course designed around an explicit process-oriented pedagogy. The…

The study developed a model of linguistic constructs to predict writing quality for college basic writers and analyzed how those constructs changed following instruction. Analysis used a corpus of argumentative essays from a quasi-experimental, instructional study with 252 students (MacArthur, Philippakos, & Ianetta, 2015) that found large…

Structural practices used by community colleges to assess, place, and teach students are undergoing transformation. Many recent changes have been shaped by the idea that barriers to success, combined with traditional policies, work against helping students pass through the developmental writing pathway. This article's purpose was to investigate…

The paper describes a case study in which the main objective is to understand how engineering students can improve their writing skills, regarding spelling and syntax, when taught specifically on these issues. The methodology Writing To Learn is applied in two courses and, making use of the written texts, the students' writing skills are assessed…

Developmental composition courses serve a sizable and growing number of Generation 1.5 students, or long-term U.S. resident language learners, and it is believed that language challenges may be part of Generation 1.5 writers' difficulty in controlling the academic register. The current study investigates possible similarities and differences…

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…

This study investigated the impact of an Internet based program designed to improve basic writing skills on grammar and punctuation scores on an English Competency Test. Three groups in a small Midwestern university's freshmen composition class were tested: a control group (Test Group 1), which did not use the program; and two treatment groups:…