This essay examines the impact of WAC/WID methodology and technology in an Education Capstone Course for Childhood Education majors at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY. Written discourse and ePortfolio development of students enrolled in the writing-intensive capstone course is examined within the framework of Veronica Boix Mansilla's (2004) work…

Since its inception in 2002, the National Center for Education Research (NCER) in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has funded over 700 education research grants and over 60 education training grants. The research grants have supported exploratory research to build theory or generate hypotheses on factors that may affect educational…

The purpose of this research study was to explore what effect instruction in metacognitive strategy (MS) use had on student achievement in a hybrid developmental English course at a community college. The study examined whether the addition of teacher-led or peer-led instruction in MS use would result in improved writing ability for the student…

In the year 2000, what started as an isolated pedagogical gambit at Glendale Community College (GCC) in Southern California has evolved into a program-wide initiative to revise the developmental composition curriculum and boost student learning outcomes. One instructor, frustrated with poor student motivation and success in his precollegiate…

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement, which swept through all levels of American education during the 1960s and 1970s, seemed a logical remedy for student writing deficiencies. However, the impact of WAC has not lived up to its promise. The WAC movement, as currently implemented in many community colleges, may be ineffective at best.…

In 2005, supported by a Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Research Initiative Grant and Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) volunteers, the TYCA Research Initiative Committee distributed the first national survey of two-year college writing programs. This online survey explored two-year college programs and…

In a College Composition II (ENG 112) class offered during the spring of 2005 at John Tyler Community College (JTCC), the author implemented an information-literacy curriculum whose salient features include: students collaborated on a semester-long, original-research project. The Metro Richmond Supermarket Price Comparison provided a focused,…

For years, educators have approached college writing from three distinct pedagogies: composition studies, basic writing, and ESL. But now as these classrooms have diversified, mixed, and blended, separated pedagogies are no longer effective. In other words, these three fields (each with its own journals and conferences) have the same common…

In the current scholarship several possible routes exist to help students look more carefully at the world around them and become more savvy consumers, thoughtful citizens, and sophisticated communicators. One of the most promising avenues for teaching students the situatedness of both writing and of the self is ethnography: a method of inquiry…

Recent cases have demonstrated that plagiarism is a hot-button issue. It is also pervasive, occurring in universities, four-year colleges, community colleges, secondary schools, graduate programs, international classrooms, multicultural classrooms, writing centers, writing-across-the-curriculum programs, scholarly publications and the popular…

This article describes the difficulties and hopes that the author, a compositionist in the English Department at Miami University, perceived in his attempts to establish a collaborative arrangement with the writing center at the regional campus where he works. (Contains 4 notes).

How do writing teachers use technology to help students learn about lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) issues? What is the nature of writing students' learning about LGB sexual orientations and academic writing when the Internet is used as a learning tool? Participants completed a questionnaire in which they reflected on a writing assignment…

Implementing deracination and the Detached Intellectual Space (D.I.S.)--components of a developing critical thinking pedagogy termed "decritique"--offer a more critically reflective alternative to classroom peer-review activities that mistakenly focus on a "notion of caring." Working within a theoretical framework drawn from Derrida and Bakhtin,…

This article describes a pilot study that suggests writing-faculty workload may affect the pedagogical focus and rhetorical effectiveness of written response to students' essays. To study the relationship between writing-faculty workload and comments that faculty write on students' essays, the author sent an eleven-question survey to 30 English…

The classroom practices discussed in "Effective Second Language Writing" reflect various trends and methodologies; however, the underlying theme in this volume of the Classroom Practice Series is the need for clear and meaningful communication between ESL writers and their readers. While approaches differ, two core beliefs are constant: ESL…