Cell phone ubiquity enables students to record and share audio file versions of their essays for proofreading purposes. Adopting this practice in community college developmental writing classes leads to an investigation of both writing as a technology and the influence of modern technology on composition and composition pedagogy.

Despite the growing linguistic diversity of students in today's community college writing classes, there has been little research on the unique problems that instructors face when students from differing second linguistic and cultural backgrounds populate the same classrooms. This study explores the extent to which four community college writing…

In 2012, the State of Connecticut enacted Public Act 12-40, legislation that dramatically changed the way remedial education was theorized, designed, and delivered at community colleges and regional state universities in Connecticut. One of the most controversial features of this legislative movement was that it appeared to establish a…

Postsecondary literacy instruction--the teaching of basic writing and transitional, or developmental, reading in community colleges and 4-year colleges--is an important and growing field, but also one still developing in key areas. In this article, we discuss three of these areas within which postsecondary literacy instruction can continue to…

Some teaching strategies grow out of the curricula educators inherit or develop through professional reading; others originate in the aromatic humus of their autobiographies. This article presents a proposal that has its origins in the latter. The author recognized that what delights her in prose or poetry is the figurative language a writer uses…

This Grounded Theory study utilized Self-determination Theory to analyze the interview results of 18 community college African American and Latino males. The goal was to learn what helped participants to succeed and persist in developmental and transfer-level writing courses despite the obstacles that they faced. Three major themes emerged: (a)…

This article reports on the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), a new model of basic writing that has produced dramatic successes for the basic writing program at the Community College of Baltimore County. Borrowing from mainstreaming programs, studio courses, fast track programs, and learning communities, ALP, for four consecutive semesters, has…

In order to better understand how to use assessment productively in the basic writing classroom, I asked the question "How do basic writers perceive the assessment process?" The research reported on in this dissertation led to the conclusion that basic writers at Dona Ana Community College perceive and value each part of the assessment…

In basic writing classrooms and scholarship, reading too often remains invisible; neither research nor established practice provides tangible activities to support reading and connect it to writing. This article documents a search for structured, scaffolded, low-stakes reading activities, a search that moves off the college campus and into the…

Multiple-choice tests of punctuation and usage are used throughout the United States to assess the writing skills of new community college students in order to place them in either a basic writing course or first-year composition. To determine whether using the COMPASS Writing Test (CWT) is a valid placement at a community college, student test…

This paper presents the findings from a follow-up quantitative analysis of the Community College of Baltimore County's Accelerated Learning Program (ALP). The results suggest that among students who enroll in the highest level developmental writing course, participation in ALP is associated with substantially better outcomes in terms of English…

Standards are the criteria we use to judge competence, and the incarnation of some version of the issue of standards has woven in and out of education policy for the last thirty years. Unfortunately, much of the discussion has been ideological, rigid, and cast in either/or terms. In this essay, I use examples from basic writing and freshman…

This paper presents the findings from a quantitative analysis of the Community College of Baltimore County's Accelerated Learning Program (ALP). Under ALP, students placed into upper-level developmental writing are "mainstreamed" into English 101 classes and simultaneously enrolled in a companion ALP course (taught by the same…

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…

This investigation was a case study to measure the retention and persistence effects of a learning community in developmental English at an urban community college. The study used student demographic and course outcome data to quantify the extent to which learning community participation could contribute toward remedying the historically low…