Blended learning, a combination of traditional face to face (F2f) instruction and computer-mediated communication (CMC), is a popular trend in many universities and corporate settings today. Most universities provide faculty members course management systems, such as Blackboard, Angel, and others as a way to organize and transmit course materials…

This essay discusses our failed attempts at the College of Charleston to sustain a Writing Studio course. Specifically, we explain how the failure of our Studio course revealed underlying problems in the department concerning the formation of writing program policy, the role of adjunct faculty, the oversight of our first-year writing curriculum,…

This dissertation reports on an action research study that sought to discover how a new WiFi, tablet computing device, the Apple iPad, affected, enhanced, and impacted student engagement in an English Honors course at Scottsdale Community College. The researcher was also the instructor in the two semester, first-year, college composition sequence…

Robert Cohen, Assistant Professor English at Fairbanks University, has just completed a contentious meeting of his First Year Composition class, which had discussed a paper written by one of the students. Joe Anderson's paper contained statements that have been historically used as anti-Semitic slogans. Cohen attempted to avoid embarrassing…

This study suggests that students repeating a first-year composition course benefit from working with specific tutors in the writing center. The article focuses on students who did not pass first-year composition and took a tutorial version of the course. A chi-square analysis shows that students working with a specific tutor had a higher pass…

This study compares the effectiveness of online textual glosses enhanced with modified corpus-extracted sentences presented in concordance lines and textual glosses enhanced with dictionary definitions drawn from an online learner's dictionary for academic vocabulary learning at higher proficiency levels. Particularly, the study aimed to determine…

How students respond to teacher-written commentary has been an under-researched topic, and the existing literature in L2 studies is contradictory. The present study analyzes the critical and positive commentary, mitigated and unmitigated, written by two community-college, first-year composition teachers on two drafts of two writing assignments…

This study explored how college freshmen at a mid-sized public university in north-eastern United States used Twitter, an anytime/anywhere writing technology, to support and promote the writing process by using tweets as a pre-writing activity. Two of the authors taught a joint course of First Year Seminar and Basic Reading in which the same group…

This study will analyze the process of revising a first-year writing program at a large Midwestern university. The institutional structure and practice of first-year writing, particularly the connected subject of basic writing, creates a site where many interrelated areas of research converge--disciplinary, pedagogical, institutional, and…

Composition teachers have generally embraced collaborative learning in the years since Kenneth Bruffee published his first article promoting its advantages in "College English" in 1972. But assigning collaboratively written papers in an introductory college writing course is still rare. This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a…

This article presents a consideration of how students' existing information-seeking behaviors affect traditional methods of teaching library research in first-year writing courses and offers an alternative method that uses both library and popular Internet search tools. It addresses one aspect of the ongoing pedagogical struggle with new…

As any reader of "About Campus" knows, binary oppositions contribute to the definitions of institutional types--the trade school versus the liberal arts college, for example. They help define disciplines and subdisciplines and the status differentials among them: consider the difference in intellectual cachet as one moves from linguistics to…

This qualitative study examines the writing and writing experiences of six bilingual (Spanish-English), immigrant university students. Immigrant students are a growing segment of university populations, but explicit/implicit language policies often overlook their unique characteristics and needs. The study draws on the continua of biliteracy model…

The author discusses his experience in a university project that led to the creation of a first-year writing text based on interviews with members of a local neighborhood. In particular, he analyzes the negative reaction that many of the community's residents expressed toward the text's portrayals of them. From the tensions that developed, the…

This paper is one of a collection of papers written by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) to support the use of content review as the basis for establishing communication and computation prerequisites. "Student Success: The Case for Establishing Prerequisites Through Content Review" was adopted at the Fall 2010…