Presents a holistic method for describing basic writers and their writing to encourage classroom research at two- and four-year colleges and enables comparisons of basic writers across institutions. Offers some preliminary results from the pilot study to illustrate the type of findings this approach yields and highlights the importance of such…

Notes that recent critiques of process approaches to writing claim that an implicit mode of instruction privileging mainstream students is typical of process approaches. Traces implicit instruction to the structuralist intellectual tradition. Concludes that a poststructuralist appreciation of differences, especially difference among discourses,…

Explains how faculty at Quinnipiac College reconceptualized developmental English and designed a new program that provides additional instructional time within the regular freshman English course. Finds that developmental students are better motivated and achieve growth in reading and writing commensurate with students who had a prior semester of…

Presents a sequenced writing assignment on shopping to aid basic writers. Describes a writing assignment focused around online and mail-order shopping. Notes steps in preparing for the assignment, the sequence, and discusses responses to the assignments. (SC)

Explores basic writing students' current writing processes, their thoughts on their writing, and their introduction to a structured writing process model. Suggests that educators can assist basic writers in becoming successful college writers by introducing them to a structured writing process model while also helping them to become reflective…

Claims much of the research composition teachers rely on to shape classroom techniques fails to incorporate the perspectives of the students. Describes broad trends in basic writing scholarship as presented in the first 17 volumes of this journal. Argues that addressing the disjunction between students' assumptions about writing and the…

Shows how letter writing can motivate basic writers. Describes how the author began teaching his first remedial writing class with a class-wide engagement in letter writing. Discusses how the class developed an active, collaborative, engaged, and inclusive spirit as students learned to put expression first and polishing later. (SR)

Literacy narratives have been pedagogically important in writing instruction, particularly in the basic writing class, as a means for students to interrogate the politics of language and education and thus to establish a critical connection to writing. But the literacy narrative as a critical genre is problematic. Such narratives often are…

Using diverse texts to critically examine America's melting pot ideal supports basic writing students' successful matriculation through rhetorically and socially challenging locations. This paper is a pedagogical study of a basic writing (BW) classroom in which students grappled with America's "melting pot" metaphor. The theme of the course…

This study examined the relationships between first semester participation in a community college developmental writing course and short and longterm academic performance. The study examined whether developmental writing course participants earned higher grades at higher rates at the end of a 3-year period following initial college enrollment when…

Basic writing has played a large role in the history and institutional identity of the City University of New York (CUNY). From the Open Admissions era of Mina Shaughnessy to the present day, "remedial courses" at CUNY have been revised in response to different colleges' missions, curricular initiatives, university policies, and public…

More than ten years have passed since the widely publicized debate about personal and academic writing that played out in the 1990s between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae. But the question of the relative merits of these two different types of writing for student writers continues to be an issue of concern for teachers of composition,…

While placement procedures and lack of writing skills are certainly perplexing, classroom practices and procedures remain the most fundamental of challenges for the developmental writing instructor for good reason: time-on-task methods are the most direct means by which students improve skill levels. One instructor found that this approach to…

An instructor of a composition and computers writing course (designed for economically and culturally disadvantaged students) at the State University of New York at Buffalo, developed electronic conferences which combine the capabilities of the computer with the conference approach. The instructor reads students' papers while sitting at the…

A case study examines a nontraditional African-American student enrolled in English 90 at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. The first person in her family to attend college, she is attractive, personal, outspoken and speaks not only the dialect of her family, which shows the influence of French, but also standard English. When asked how…