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…

This study examined student perspectives about writing by interviewing both typically developing and struggling writers in Grades 2 through 8. The findings revealed a progressive developmental pattern of writing knowledge in which novice writers place more emphasis on the physical product and local meaning, while more experienced writers focus on…

Course designs for Basic English Writing classes vary from one course to another. The objective of this study was to investigate the semantic misinterpretation of English words found in the English compositions written by native-Chinese-speaking undergraduate students and to overcome if such a barrier occurred in the process of writing. First,…

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…

While the roots of students' fear of writing go deep, students fear most the surface of writing. They fear that a person's language indicates the state not only of the mind but of the soul--thus their writing can make them look stupid and morally depraved. This fear of error and lack of confidence prevent students from developing a command of the…

Intended for teachers of basic writing, this book contains a collection of new and updated essays addressing issues surrounding underprepared writers. It maps errors and expectations for basic writing and develops teaching approaches that will be effective in a social and political world. The book considers concepts such as the possibility of…

According to an instructor of basic writing in the Writing Lab at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, he can teach differently in a computer-networked writing lab than he did in a conventional classroom. Because the room is designed to teach writing and nothing else, it offers a congenial workspace where the teacher can interact with…

Explores some of the differences between faculty and policy advocates by analyzing spatial/directional metaphors used by individuals in each professional domain to describe notions of access and standards. Notes that advocates in the policy-oriented discourse tend to use vertical metaphors, while educators engaged in pedagogical discourse tend to…

Finds that students who become part of an active, student-centered learning community have a greater change of succeeding in college than those who do not. Explores the nature and structure of learning community programs and what makes them so effective in contributing to the success of entering college students, English-as-a-second-language (ESL)…

Discusses the implications of considering different writing components (lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical) separately, in an effort to avoid problems of writing evaluation. Proposes that instead of "balancing" these components, teachers should separate them in working to establish curricula for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students. (MM)

Explores different modes of responding to student papers in two sections of an Introduction to Writing Process class for native and non-native speakers. Finds no significant differences in performance of the two sections, although students who received only positive comments frequently initiated their own corrections and seemed to gain greater…