English 1311: Expository English Composition is the first semester course in a two-semester first-year composition (FYC) sequence. Both ENG 1311 and its second-semester counterpart, ENG 1312, are required for all students unless they have transfer credit covering this requirement or place out of one or both of the courses via the College-Level…

This article describes how the author applied principles of universal design to hybrid course materials to increase student understanding and, ultimately, success. Pulling the three principles of universal design--consistency, color, and icon representation--into the author's Blackboard course allowed her to change the types of reading skills…

Rhetorically challenging literature can be made to serve the purposes of first-year composition in new ways. Excerpts from the novels of Marcel Proust that focus on the author's characteristic scrutinizing, reflexive attention to style work successfully as models for assisting writers in acquiring the habits of reading and re-reading, and of…

Why are students silent? Using written reflections and interviews, Mary M. Reda examines students' perceptions of speaking and being silent in a first-year composition classroom, and explores how their teachers, classroom relationships, and their own sense of identity shape their decisions to speak or be silent. By challenging many firmly held…

It is our belief that the story of how the composition faculty convinced administration to move from a rubric-based assessment model to a more qualitative model is both interesting and beneficial for others facing similar challenges. In the following five articles, Katie discusses how the experience of such assessment affected the faculty, Jeff…

This dissertation explores study habits and interactions of students in an online first-year writing course. Much research has been conducted about online learning, but little has focused specifically on first-year writing students. First-year writing presents some unique challenges because of the age and preparedness level of traditional…

The role of reflection in the learning process has taken on new significance in a digital environment. The potential of using innovative teaching methods to prompt first-year writing students to self-regulate learning behaviors and write more critical reflection statements when using electronic portfolios was studied over eight fall semesters.…

As English spreads as an international language, it evolves through diverse users' writing and speaking. However, traditional views of ESL users focus on their distance from fairly static notions of English-language competence. This research uses a grounded theory approach to describe a range of competencies that emerge in ESL users' interactions…

To attract and retain more students, colleges are increasingly attempting to maximize their academic offerings by including intensive classes. These abbreviated or condensed courses, which are typically available during the summer and sometimes during winter intersession, provide students with an opportunity to move quickly through required…

It is the scope of this article to present a theoretical framework for successful collaboration and our ideas on how it might be implemented in a first-year college composition classroom. We began by creating a collaborative assignment for our composition classes based on a very cursory understanding of successful collaboration. In light of this…

Online discourse has become a common mode of communication for the Twenty-First Century. Many businesses now use electronic networking sites such as Facebook to communicate with customers through online posts and electronic updates through Twitter. With these recent trends in electronic communication, some educators have begun implementing…

Students majoring in university studies are not unlike students majoring in English--both groups of students are graduating with a degree that is often hard to sell. Colleges try to recruit first year composition students--to join them in reading great books as well as writing the next great American novel. Students are told they will be qualified…

The Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is a deeply integrated model for writing programs, bringing together the writing center, first-year writing, basic writing, professional development activities, graduate coursework, and research activities to re-imagine and support twenty-first-century literacies. What is unique about CLiC is not merely the…

An art and design university is a particular kind of "semiotic landscape," comprised of teachers and students heavily invested in the difference that non-linguistic modes of expression make to meaning and human experience. Here both experienced and emerging creative practitioners experiment with the signifying possibilities of, for example, wood,…

Do students transfer the skills that they learn in English 101 to other courses and contexts? Often, it seems that they do not--or, at least, that the transfer is not visible or readily apparent. On the positive side, however, one may underestimate the complex nature of many of the tasks that students undertake, often for the first time, in the…