This article explores historical debates over the relationship of composition to rhetoric, arguing that these debates resonate with contemporary arguments about first year writing and undergraduate and graduate programs in writing and rhetoric. Analyzing early scholars' articulations of the differing aims of undergraduate and graduate studies,…

While comics have received widespread acceptance as a literary genre, instructors and scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have been slower to adopt comics, largely because of a lingering difficulty understanding how the characteristics of the form relate to our work in the classroom. Using as guides the "WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year…

This article describes a model for supporting undergraduate research that can be adapted for very different classroom contexts; we implemented this model in a first-year general education composition class, a second-year Psychology class and a fourth-year English literature seminar. We examine student work created for each class as well as…

Institutional assessment initiatives can provide opportunities to make the intellectual work of teaching and learning in composition studies more visible. Reciprocally, the scholarship of teaching and learning's situatedness within disciplinary norms and values can enhance institutional assessments, providing a check on the tendency to rely…

This essay takes up the question of fostering independent student identities and universal student success by exploring Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in the first-year composition classroom. To do so, the author first defines Universal Design for Learning and then attends briefly to contemporary English studies research on UDL. The author…

Reading, whether the reader's First language, L1 or Second language, L2, is a cognitive enterprise, and it can be treated as a result of the interaction among the reader, the text, and the context. Metacognitive strategies refer to the behaviours applied by learners to plan, arrange, and evaluate their learning. This study aimed to investigate…

We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is "simplistic in method and impoverished in content" by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a…

In this article, Lauren S. Cardon states that what faculty see as student apathy or disengagement in the millennial generation is due to a number of factors, most of which are associated with the technological revolution. Millennial students are generally resistant to highly abstract material if not given the opportunity to reflect on its…

This study describes English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' use of vocabulary consolidation strategies and explores the connection between strategy use and vocabulary learning outcomes. This study included 218 participants who were students from five freshman English classes at a university in Taiwan. Students' self-reports on their use of…

As international student enrollment increases on college campuses across the US, the landscape of the composition classroom is among the first to observe the shift in the student demographic. Though some international students benefit from developmental English and ESL initiatives, most will eventually experience the mainstream writing classroom.…

This study explored the use of a tailored online peer review program for first-year undergraduate students at an urban college of technology. The program facilitated group peer review in meaningful and technologically elegant ways. Students in a composition class were divided into two groups. One group acted as first reviewers, and the other group…

The study investigated the effects of the Cognitive Level and Quality Writing Assessment (CLAQWA) rubric on the cognitive and writing skill growth in freshmen composition classes. The participants were enrolled at a Midwestern state university. The nonequivalent control group design used quantitative analysis with selected criteria from the CLAQWA…

Previous research showed that motivation influences writing in school settings (Hidi & Boscolo, 2006), but further empirical research is needed to understand how motivation influences specific writing tasks (Bruning & Horn, 2000; Haswell, 2006). This study addresses that gap in research by investigating how the motivational construct of…

The purpose of this study was to research whether or not the intervention of the Reed & Kellogg System of sentence diagramming would make a significant difference in the acquisition, retention, and comprehension of the basic grammatical skills, including parts of speech, complements, phrases, clauses, and sentence structures, on the higher…

In this article we consider the ways in which college writers make use of prior knowledge as they take up new writing tasks. Drawing on two studies of transfer, both connected to a Teaching for Transfer composition curriculum for first-year students, we articulate a theory of prior knowledge and document how the use of prior knowledge can detract…