Remarkably little has been published on what works or does not work in online basic writing (BW) instruction. Internet-based learning is not a natural fit for BW students, and instructors planning hybrid or distance learning courses face a difficult task, with little theory to guide them. This article reviews current research and advice on three…

In this article, the authors discuss what works for them in their first-year composition classes. In order to promote critical thinking and goal setting within her developmental writing and first-year composition classes, Susan Plachta begins their first class session by completing the standard introductions and syllabus discussions and finishes…

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…

This article examines how institutions of higher education conflate moral and descriptive terms for good, bad, remedial, and basic writing students. It outlines some of the social and historical developments that have led to exclusionary admissions and curricular requirements, and identifies how Christian institutions are complicit in these…

In this essay, the authors describe the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning project that conducted a qualitative study of the writing development of 21 student writers during the first year of college, tracking their progress in an English 101 course and following them as they moved into the core, transfer-level composition course.…

This article examines Yale's "Awkward Squad" of "basic" writers between 1920 and 1960. Using archival materials that illustrate the socioeconomic conditions of this early, "pre-Shaughnessy" site of remedial writing instruction, I argue for a re-definition of "basic" in composition studies using local, institutional values rather than generic…

Academic writing is something we all want our students to do well. The ability of our students to use writing in meaningful ways seems to lag far behind what we know they can do. The author introduces a technique to assist in teaching college academic writing. Writing for personal goals is contrasted with student academic writing. The integration…

The author describes the challenges of a four-year, open-admission institution where equality of access has not equaled equality of success for basic writers. While there is a good deal of scholarship on student departure by compositions and experts in student retention and persistence, some models of student departure and success offered by these…

The critical literature abounds with examples of possible educational uses of Web 2.0 technology in which students become active participants in the production of knowledge through blogging, social networking, creation of podcasts, and other forms of constructivist education. At the same time, teachers, whom the data indicate are somewhat…

In the tradition of work by Shaughnessy (1977) and Bartholomae (1980) applying concepts from second language acquisition research to developing writing, we explore the commonalities of L1 and L2 writers on the specific level of linguistic choices needed to order information within and across sentence boundaries. We propose that many of the kinds…

This essay focuses on how young women students in a first-year, first-quarter basic reading and writing course wrote about their connections to the process of identity development as portrayed in the graphic novel "Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return" by Marjane Satrapi. While the circumstances of becoming a student in a required…

The early success of the revised ESL literacy development curriculum for international undergraduates at a large Midwestern university suggests that a curriculum which integrates reading and writing activity around meaning-making tasks with texts and focuses on fluency before accuracy is preferable to a skill-based curriculum. Support for this…

The Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is a deeply integrated model for writing programs, bringing together the writing center, first-year writing, basic writing, professional development activities, graduate coursework, and research activities to re-imagine and support twenty-first-century literacies. What is unique about CLiC is not merely the…

A developmental writing scale for timed essay-writing performance was created on the basis of automatically computed indicators of writing fluency, word choice, and conventions of standard written English. In a large-scale data collection effort that involved a national sample of more than 12,000 students from 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grade,…

Online learning, according to a recent Department of Education meta-analysis (Means et al. 2009), is equal to and sometimes better than traditional face-to-face instruction, while hybrid education is best of all. Students seem eager to reap those online benefits; the March 2009 "Digest of Education Statistics" reports that the U.S. college with…