Community college campuses around the United States serve an increasingly diverse student body. A report from the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights highlights this growing trend by outlining a plan to increase racial diversity at four-year institutions by encouraging transfers from community colleges, primarily because community…

This article describes a study of how students use first person pronouns in papers written for undergraduate courses in multiple disciplines. If prompted, students imitate some of the ways experts use first person to establish their authority; but just as often students use first person pronouns to express uncertainty or to reveal that they have…

The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that teachers should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but they cannot help others until they learn to help themselves by reflecting on their own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and…

This article presents a commentary exchange between authors Laurie Grobman and Richard C. Raymond regarding Raymond's article "Re-placing Lit in Comp II: Pragmatic/Humanistic Benefits." Grobman said that in her brief commentary on Raymond's article, she chooses not to explicitly address his thesis that literature belongs in a research-based…

In 2008, Queensborough Community College incorporated service learning into 15 remedial reading and writing courses. To determine its impact, statistical analyses were performed, and they demonstrated significantly (a) higher GPAs, (b) improved rates of retention, and (c) the completion of more college credits among service learning participants.…

The primary objective of this dissertation was to help illuminate why most students who enroll in developmental English at community colleges never make it to a college-level course. The extant literature suggests that students' learning experiences in a course largely account for success or failure, yet few studies have uncovered how students…

Intertextuality is a vital component of college reading and writing. In order to write a paper that requires the synthesizing of readings, students must recognize the intertextual connections among all their sources. Instruction that fosters intertextual awareness in basic writers can help them overcome their tendency to compartmentalize what they…

The Silent Socratic Dialogue (SSD) writing warm-up technique places college students in a dialogic setting in which they construct the texts that explore, inform, and challenge each other through a succession of questions and answers. It validates students' voices, ideas, and interactions as worthy of study while engaging them in the…

This study gathered information on student engagement with Facebook, and described non-native English speakers' (NNS) expectations and experience. This also assessed the relationship this technology has with writing efficacy and compared NNS and native English speakers (NS) groups. Demographic data were collected and means were compared to…

Contrastive rhetoric studies the writing of second language learners to understand how it is affected by their first language and culture. The field of contrastive rhetoric is as multidimensional as second language writing is complex. It draws on the work of contrastive analysis, anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy, culture studies, translation…

Writing centers in American institutions of higher education have existed in one form or another since the late 1800s and early 1900s, providing individualized writing tutoring and support for students. As writing centers evolved, questions arose regarding the effects of writing tutoring on student writing. Some assessment studies on writing…

The community colleges in the state of New Jersey went through a process of establishing statewide cut-off scores for English and mathematics placement tests. The colleges wanted to communicate to secondary schools a consistent preparation that would be necessary for enrolling in Freshman Composition and College Algebra at the community college…

Whenever the author teaches English 102, a research-focused, second-semester composition course, at least one student asks her whether or not she "allows" Wikipedia. She then redesigned her course to leverage Wikipedia as a source of inquiry. In other words, she "allows" Wikipedia, but through the Wikipedia project, which is designed to address…

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…

Attrition is a major issue facing nearly all institutions of higher learning. The loss of students affects colleges and universities on many levels and can have a negative impact on students. Community colleges often experience greater attrition than other types of institutions and have an increased need to curb the outflow of students. This study…