In this article, the authors report on an assessment project they recently conducted at their open admissions community college to assess student work at the end of the basic writing sequence. The authors' focus for this project was on the way students used essay structure. They gathered artifacts from students who were deemed "ready" by…

When college composition teachers carefully consider the role and function of multimodal composition in their classrooms, they can enhance the teaching of writing and communication, engage and empower students, and better prepare students for the challenges and possibilities of life in our rapidly changing digital age. To meet this teaching…

Reporting on a year-and-a-half-long study of Latina/Latino multilingual students transitioning from high school to a community college or university on the US-Mexico border, this article explores how writing instruction was shaped across the three institutional locations by a variety of internal and external forces such as standardized testing…

Veterans make up a fair number of potential students. It is important to understand them, even if teachers do not agree with the politics of the War on Terror, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), or Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In working with the veterans at Black Hawk College and other two-year and four-year institutions, the author has learned…

In this article, the author discusses the importance of incorporating more methods that promote reflection-in-action--or reflecting on the immediate thoughts and reactions that a person has while performing an act, the time "during which one can still make a difference to the situation at hand"--into response situations. Reflection is something…

A solution to the problem of preparing non-college ready students has been to offer developmental/remedial courses in community colleges. Studies have shown that students who begin and persist in these courses do just as well, if not better, than non-developmental education students. The majority of studies, however, have not examined the…

The purpose of this study was to explore the responsibilities of the instructor in an English composition course at a community college. In particular, the study explored the role of the instructor in implementing required department curriculum and learning objectives into the course plan. The study was conducted through multiple case study.…

Developmental education courses have become a standard in community colleges in the United States. An overwhelming majority of these public two-year schools offer developmental courses to a wide array of students. At the same time, developmental programs are under a constant barrage of attacks from a variety of stakeholder organizations that view…

Learning communities are common on two- and four-year college campuses. Estimates suggest that they exist on four to five hundred campuses and can be found in most states. Such numbers signal that interest in learning communities is going strong, and there are indications that on two-year college campuses, interest continues to grow. As…

Much has been written by academics lamenting the lack of preparedness of students for entrance to the university (and, by employers, lamenting the additional training that students need after college to enter the workforce). Although such lamentations may be merited, students pick up the binary rhetoric of real world versus academic world that…

In this article, the author offers a new strategy for working with sentences in college composition that prompts students to access and apply their native grammatical abilities. The chunking strategy that she advocates is based on meaning and rests at a level of analysis that transcends varieties. It builds on the grammatical competence that…

Using images in the classroom to help students find meaning in literature is not new. Although composition teachers have long used the visual arts as a source for stimulating student engagement, sometimes the subject matter can fail to achieve the desired result. Too often, students lack the vocabulary or frame of reference to be engaged in a work…

Like many compositions at majority schools, the author felt disturbed by his students' lack of racial awareness. During the 2007-08 academic year, the author tried a completely different approach to teaching composition that targeted white racial awareness. Identifying race as the course theme, he developed a curriculum that teaches rhetorical…

In this article, the author offers her experience of modeling mistakes and writing spontaneously in the computer classroom to get students' attention and elicit their editorial response. She describes how she taught her class about major sentence errors--comma splices, run-ons, and fragments--through her Sentence Meditation exercise, a rendition…

"Generation 1.5" is a term being used to describe a type of second language (L2) long-term U.S. resident who may demonstrate persistent language-related challenges (Roberge, Siegel, & Harklau, 2009). Among the difficulties commonly noted with Generation 1.5 students are problems in controlling the academic register expected in…