This purpose of this study was to identify how adult ELL community college students perceive their experience in the development of academic literacy, specifically academic writing, and to explore their perceptions of the factors, attitudes, and experiences that have facilitated their development of that level of academic literacy. To address this…

This essay recounts the authors' experiences as community college faculty members in a learning community (LC) linking first-year composition with a class in life-career planning and development. The authors begin with a learning community story shared recently over drinks with a group of community college English teachers. They use the story to…

This ethnographic narrative employs a neo-Vygotskian perspective (Holland et al.) to examine how, in the setting of a remedial ESL program at a public two-year college in North Georgia, the subject position of an ESL basic writing instructor was mediated by her understandings of and engagement with the multiple and interactive contexts of her…

Although teacher feedback is vital in teaching students to write, and is a topic of interest and debate in L1 (native or first-language) and L2 (second language) composition theory, there are virtually no studies that analyze teacher commentary conducted in a linguistically diverse setting of L1 and L2 first-year composition students. This study,…

This study investigates the types of sources that English composition students use in their research essays. Unlike previous studies, this project pairs an examination of source citations with deeper analysis of source use, and both are discussed in relation to responses gathered in focus groups with participating students and teachers. The…

For five years, the author has been advocating a writing program administrator (WPA) position at his two-year college. While the vice president of instruction has been sympathetic, the issue has been funding. As a means to prepare and to justify the WPA's continuing existence, he has set to work mapping out the terrain, trying to anticipate the…

In this Cross Talk, Mark Blaauw-Hara, the author of "Mapping the Frontier: A Survey of Twenty Years of Grammar Articles in 'TETYC,'" and one of the manuscript's reviewers, Andy Anderson, engage in a brief conversation about the essay, its content, and the processes of writing, reviewing, and revising. This article is presented in three sections:…

This paper explains how first-year composition students wrote business sales letters about short fiction and then revised those letters into full-fledged literary essays that analyzed the stories. By completing these two writings back-to-back (that is, experiencing the metagenres between business writing and literary analysis), students not only…

A major challenge for the increasing multicultural and multilingual community college student population has been the difficulty in accessing the register features which define academic writing. In this study, an analysis of clause structures using writing samples collected from 45 community-college students, 15 from African-American, Haitian and…

Critical Language Awareness (CLA) is one literacy tool that students need in order to examine limit-situations or "what went wrong." Norman Fairclough defines CLA as an awareness of the ways in which ideas become naturalized or taken for granted as "truths" about the natural and social world and how these "truths" are tied up with language in use.…

Many composition teachers use the writing conference to provide feedback to their students; however, the existing literature on the subject indicates that teachers may unintentionally harm their weaker students by using this strategy. To better understand the effect of the writing conference on developmental writing students, the researcher…

The purpose of this paper is to examine signature pedagogies for the education doctorate. Three California State University campuses that have started new Ed.D. programs examine practices that distinguish the education doctoral experience from other professions. Embedded field work, the professional seminar, and the research and writing support…

Current research indicates that students often have a difficult time getting started on reaching their course goals. This study examines the impact of an intervention exercise on the final grades and success rates of two groups of community college students in California. At the beginning of the spring semester 2007, students in two English…

Fayette County, once home to the Carnegies, the Mellons, and the Fricks, now punctuated by abandoned mines and coke ovens, is the second poorest county in Pennsylvania. Gay and lesbian students experience discrimination in this County. In this article, the author discusses her efforts to intervene in this complicated problem by deploying a…

Catawba Valley Community College has introduced digital storytelling (DS), an innovative instructional method that has produced extraordinary results. Digital storytelling uses affordable software to craft powerful multimedia presentations of student writing. Students create 3-to-4-minute movies with images, voiceovers, and music. This project…