The author describes the challenges of a four-year, open-admission institution where equality of access has not equaled equality of success for basic writers. While there is a good deal of scholarship on student departure by compositions and experts in student retention and persistence, some models of student departure and success offered by these…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of adopting blogging upon Chinese language composition instruction in a vocational high school in Taiwan. The researchers developed a model that utilises blogging in Chinese language composition instruction. Forty randomly selected students from a public vocational high school served as the…

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…

In recent years, synchronous online peer response groups have been increasingly used in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. This article describes a study of synchronous online interaction among three small peer groups in a Taiwanese undergraduate EFL writing class. An environmental analysis of students' online discourse in two writing…

Writing, for adolescents who live in an age of digital communication, has taken on new importance and plays a prominent role in the way they socialize, share information, and structure communication. New literacies expand the literacy realm by considering the skills needed to function using media other than the printed page. Internet resources can…

This article reports on a study designed to explore whether and in what ways individual students' technological literacies might impact collaborative teams. For the collaborative team discussed in this article, technological literacy--specifically, limited repertoires for solving technical problems, clashes between document management strategies,…

We argue that the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, with its dual emphasis on literacy and occupational skills, can serve as a new model for writing classrooms and writing program administrators. We further contend that the "contact zone" classroom should be replaced with community-based "federations."…

This article is a collaboration between WAC/WID and second language acquisition (SLA) specialists. It examines alternate disciplinary notions of the place of writing among other skills and adapts concepts from SLA theory and pedagogy with the goal of providing new interdisciplinary options for WAC/WID research and classroom practice.

This article offers a linguistic analysis of interpersonal stancetaking in four argumentative term papers written in an upper-level undergraduate course in economics. Two of the papers were written by English L2 writers who experienced particular difficulty with the assignment and two by English L1 writers who received the highest grades among the…

Debate regarding appropriate instructional practices for linguistically and culturally diverse students led to a study of a bilingual Latina teacher's third-grade writing workshop. Qualitative research methods were used to provide a rich description of context, instruction, and participation. This was combined with the teacher's personal narrative…

Post-secondary writing teachers in composition and English as a second language (ESL) writing programs are likely familiar with multi-draft composing. Both composition and ESL writing programs share nearly identical multi-draft models despite the very unique and different cultures of each group. We argue that multi-draft composing as it is…

Academic writing is something we all want our students to do well. The ability of our students to use writing in meaningful ways seems to lag far behind what we know they can do. The author introduces a technique to assist in teaching college academic writing. Writing for personal goals is contrasted with student academic writing. The integration…

Purpose: This paper seeks to consider whether the notion of authenticity is useful or meaningful in the context of developing academics as writers. Design/methodology/approach: The approach taken is that of a reflective essay. Recent texts on authenticity in higher education are examined whilst a transactional theory of writing is also considered…

Editing is a powerful tool for writers, but are our methods of teaching it really demonstrating that power for young adolescents? The author, frustrated with students' inability to edit, blames his own approach and, beginning with a grocery store epiphany, works to develop a more effective system. Elements of his successful approach include time…

Business communication instructors understand the value of helping students learn, discuss, apply, and manipulate communication strategies on the basis of purpose and audience. This rhetorical bent encourages active learning through activities and multi-purpose projects, but active learning often works best when students believe they are engaging…