Examines whether first-year composition students at two state universities believe that portfolios are as effective for students as composition instructors widely assume them to be. Investigates the assumption in composition pedagogy that portfolios are good for students' writing and that students like and appreciate the opportunity to be in a…

Ongoing discussion between the Oregon State University (OSU) libraries' acting instruction coordinator and the Assistant Composition Coordinator focuses on improving collaboration between our programs and more effectively integrating the research process into the English composition curriculum. We briefly describe a qualitative analysis of the…

In "Active Reading," Mark Panek details the dialogic model for discussing reading assignments in introductory composition courses he developed while teaching at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. He then argues for the model's appropriateness and effectiveness for diverse student populations, situating his discussion in the conversation of…

Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.

As most college-level instructors would agree, teaching aspiring teachers is no easy task. However, an added challenge presents itself when instructors must "enact" that which they are teaching. Each time public speaking and education professors stand before their college students, they are faced with the task of not only "teaching" the required…

The first reading assignment one educator gives his first-year composition students helps answer their questions about what college work will be like. For this reason, he gives them Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" to read, a book which shows that the late 20th century is undergoing a vast epistemological shift, moving from…

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…

Students and teachers need to discuss and understand what kind of role each expects the other to assume at various points in the writing process. In other words, teachers should make their strategies and goals for responding explicit, and should give students the opportunity to explain their perspectives and their reactions. Even if they cannot…

Three teachers of first-year composition used cross-grading as a way of extending the student's grasp of interpretive communities as arbiters of value as well as creators of meaning. Students in six sections (two experimental groups) approached the English 101 Common Final in the same manner, discussing a published article and sharing their…

A study designed a model for evaluating college writing programs by means of an analysis of the most important component, students. The study was conducted at the University of South Carolina Coastal Carolina College and involved first-year students. Subjects, six students who scored one (on a scale from one to four) on the holistically scored…

This paper describes the efforts of the director of a composition program who is also a teacher of composition at an open admissions college to teach critical thinking by showing students how to use content rather than just acquire it. Applying Jean Piaget's learning theory to classroom teaching, the director attempts to create an active learning…

First-year composition courses (particularly the semester course devoted to exposition, argumentation, and research) were the site at Western Carolina University for an alliance between professors and librarians as they attempted to integrate information literacy. Librarians developed six modules to teach "The Big Six Skills Approach to…

Considering that some feminist critics have recently been approaching composition theory from a preconceived feminist perspective, the issue of maintaining an analytical bias while conducting research is once more emerging. By imposing an analytical model on a body of data, scholars run the risk of ignoring conclusions or focusing on those which…

Focusing on the importance of helping students to be aware of diverse viewpoints and customs, and to understand their own cultural heritage, this paper discusses how multicultural awareness is addressed in an introductory literature class and a composition class. The paper's first section introduces the basic elements in multicultural education,…

News writing students at two universities were surveyed concerning their perceptions of freshman composition and its usefulness for other academic writing, journalistic writing, and the work world. The survey was also designed to determine whether students believed freshman composition and journalism emphasized the same writing skills and whether…