This project was born out of my preoccupation with my students' struggle to articulate their ideas at the sentence level. After being assigned an English 102 Honors class, I realized that although the sentences of these advanced writers were grammatically correct, they were stylistically problematic because they were often obscure and evasive…

This study explores the disparity between college students' self-efficacy beliefs regarding their writing skills and their teachers' perceptions of the latter. It also examines ways to improve the academic writing instruction provided by the institution, and the impact of a first-year introductory academic-writing course. A total of 151 third-year…

This study reports on how the supplementation of online resources, informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL), impacted English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) student writers' development of critical thinking skills. Through qualitative analyses of student-teacher interactions, interviews with students, and students' written documents, the…

This article asks us to consider what the process of healing and composition pedagogy have to learn from each other. More specifically, it identifies how the therapeutic potential of writing, which has been largely neglected in the academy in recent years, can influence the ways we teach transferable writing skills. The article considers how…

The study utilised a fine-grained diagnostic checklist to assess first-year undergraduates in Hong Kong and evaluated its validity and usefulness for diagnosing academic writing in English. Ten English language instructors marked 472 academic essays with the checklist. They also agreed on a Q-matrix, which specified the relationships among the…

Adult students are now enrolling into colleges and universities in large numbers. Their life responsibilities and time away from school create challenges for academic success. A portion of these learners are also non-native English speakers who face compounded difficulties. One of the skill areas that these students need to cultivate is academic…

Students in college composition courses should experiment with a variety of discourse styles--referential, persuasive, literary, and expressionistic--as opposed to a more traditional focus on the mastery of academic discourse. David Bartholomae assigns freshmen writers the goal of becoming like academics by assuming a "language not their…

Studying the life of Langston Hughes in the context of how to teach freshman composition can shed light on two sometimes conflicting pedagogies, the expressivist and the social-constructionist. A discouraging period of fierce criticism, illness, depression, and financial woes coincided with Hughes' 39th birthday, which his biographer Arnold…

The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed analysis of the style of exemplary first-year writing in order to establish and understand those features of written discourse that first-year writing teachers most value and reward. Having established the stylistic features of exemplary first-year writing, the paper goes on to provide first-year…

To help remedy the problem of college freshmen being unable to explore the diversity of writing strategies expected of them, an extensive review of current research on the composing process was undertaken. Freshmen writers must realize that composing is often a messy, recursive process based on rhetorical awareness, out of which clear and correct…

Focused freewriting, broadly defined as writing without stopping and editing about a specific topic, has been viewed and used as a powerful tool for developing student writing in a wide spectrum of educational contexts. This study aimed to further explore the use of focused freewriting in the context of promoting students' academic skills…

A study investigated whether there were significant differences between male and female basic writers, examining the writing processes and products of 19 male and female college freshmen basic writers in a university and 33 male and female freshmen basic writers in a junior college. Results indicated that both groups of students, male and female…

This study is the seventh in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This part of the study examines whether students could make more significant revisions in their writing if they were merely prompted to examine and…

Involving graduate teaching assistants (GAs) in the development and implementation of rubrics has many benefits. GA involvement increases their sense of ownership of the rubrics and makes it more likely that they will regard the rubrics in a positive light. GAs have insights about the students whose work will be evaluated by the rubrics; and, as…

A study examined: (1) first-year college students and their perceptions of writing; (2) teaching assistants and their discursive preferences; and (3) possible limitations in the program's approach toward portfolio assessment. The study began with the examination of narration, persuasion, and analysis papers from six freshman portfolios. These…