ABSTRACT Developing second language (L2) reading skills is a core competency for university students who typically enter higher education with varied L2 proficiency and reading abilities. This study examined the effect of summarizing strategy on Iranian mechanical engineering students’ reading skills. Adopting a quasi-experimental design, the experimental group wrote eight summaries of the texts they had read over an academic year while the control group did conventional post-reading activities. Pre- and post-treatment reading comprehension results revealed that students who received summary training/practice significantly outperformed the control group. Analysis of the progress that each individual made further showed that summarizing benefited all the students practicing summarizing regardless of their initial reading skills and language proficiency. These findings might help teachers seeking ways to develop reading comprehension among non-English-major university students.

ABSTRACT Instructors expect students to take notes during class, but students are often unfamiliar with effective notetaking strategies. This article examines whether teaching students to take notes using self-assessments helps to improve student notetaking ability and aids students in understanding how to accurately evaluate their own notes. Students complete a class notes assignment wherein they learn how to take notes and self-assess their performance twice throughout an academic term. Using class notes and self-assessments from nine introduction to American politics courses with this assignment (N = 194), the article shows that students’ notetaking ability improved during the course. Instructors should think carefully about their expectations for student notetaking ability and consider incorporating opportunities for students to develop and assess their own notetaking strategies as part of course assignments.

ABSTRACT As more students with learning difficulties attend college, it is important to address the unique needs of students with reading deficits. This paper introduces strategies that can be taught alongside academic content, discusses ways to merge reading support with content, and offers a framework that could be adapted to support diverse learning needs in higher education. A case study with supplemental materials illustrates how a reading laboratory approach was developed to support students’ reading skills, while enrolled in a psychology lecture course. Educators can review sample activities and consider ways to integrate support strategies into content lectures to improve reading comprehension.

ABSTRACT This essay seeks to clarify and engage the challenges that generative AI presents to students and teachers of college writing. For student writers, critical literacy offers an effective pedagogy in which students learn about academic expectations by reflecting on those expectations rather than merely attempting to mimic them. Generative AI presents students and teachers with invitations to forego these reflective capacities of writing and instead automatically reproduce academic expectations. Accordingly, in this essay we explore resources for engagement, situating critical scholarship on generative AI in relation to work in the field of Writing Studies promoting critical literacies for educational access. Here, we highlight the importance of involving students in learning writing as a practice that draws from their lived experience to scrutinize and deliberate the mediums that constitute their shared symbolic environment. Extending this linkage, we go on to share critical literacy activities and dialogs in which students create writing as a deliberative practice and foundational educational antidote to the automated indoctrination of chatbots.

ABSTRACT This study extends the notion that text abbreviations popularly used in online communication that appear in learners’ formal writing could be a predictor of their writing anxiety. Quantitative data were collected from 337 tertiary-level learners through questionnaires, and a correlational design was employed to investigate the relationships among their writing self-efficacy, use of text abbreviations, and writing anxiety. A multiple regression analysis was then utilized to gauge the extent to which self-efficacy and text abbreviations could predict writing anxiety. Though previous studies on text abbreviations and learners’ writing skills have yielded mixed findings, the present study confirms learners’ writing self-efficacy and the use of text abbreviations as significant predictors of their writing anxiety. The paper also discusses the pedagogical implications of the study.

ABSTRACT Undergraduate students rarely complete course readings. The purpose of the study was to determine if requiring textbooks in undergraduate courses impacted students’ grades. Three courses were randomized to have one section use their normal textbook and one section to use no textbook. Of 380 students who completed the courses, 128 completed questionnaires about their demographics, reading habits, motivations and strategies to learn, and gave permission to track grades. Mixed-effects regression models indicated that the presence of a textbook did not impact course grades. However, students who reported completing the assigned readings frequently, especially before class, performed significantly (p = .009) better. We conclude that the mere presence of a textbook does not impact students’ grades, but that student behavior regarding assigned readings does significantly impact their grades.

ABSTRACT English academic writing poses significant challenges for learners due to its cognitive and affective demands, particularly in under-researched contexts such as Bangladesh. This qualitative study investigated the sources of writing anxiety and coping strategies employed by Bangladeshi EFL university students. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and reflective diaries involving 24 undergraduate students enrolled in an English writing course, with thematic analysis revealing three frequently experienced sources of anxiety: (1) linguistic challenges (academic vocabulary deficits and L1 interference), (2) fear of evaluation (peer/teacher judgment), and (3) low self-efficacy. Participants adopted four key coping strategies: (1) planning and organization (outlining and prioritizing ideas), (2) motivational regulation (career aspirations and reframing challenges), (3) emotional self-regulation (mindfulness and positive reframing), and (4) sustained practice (regular writing and extensive reading). The findings highlight the interplay of cognitive, affective, and cultural factors unique to Bangladesh’s diglossic educational environment, where Bengali-English use and high-stakes assessments can exacerbate anxiety. This study contributes to EFL writing research by emphasizing context-specific interventions, such as genre-based pedagogy, constructive feedback practices, and strategies to bridge L1/L2 rhetorical norms.

ABSTRACT Educational reformers’ claims of developmental education as facilitating or preventing postsecondary access illustrate the need for developmental educators to clearly articulate our own understandings of access beyond implicit assumptions within the field of access as somehow related to our broader goals of educational equity and student success. This article presents a content analysis examining developmental education scholarly articles containing 2,130 mentionings of access throughout a corpus of 476 articles in six developmental education journals. Our analysis illuminates how authors do not operationally define access or articulate a clear path for increasing student access, as well as arguing the need for reformers to engage additional stakeholders in student access discussions. We call upon developmental educators and reformers alike to draw upon our knowledge of developmental education as a comprehensive system of services to promote student success and graduation specifically for marginalized populations.

ABSTRACT The postsecondary context plays a critical role in shaping students’ trajectories toward becoming participatory members within their disciplinary communities. Immersed into literacy-rich learning environments, students must navigate and assimilate existing literacies with increasing expectations for disciplinary-specific practices. Prior research suggests that student novices are enculturated into these discursive ways of thinking, being, and doing through apprenticeship from expert community members such as faculty; however, descriptive accounts of such relationships and processes are largely absent. This case study explores how disciplinary apprenticeship is constructed and experienced from the lived experiences of novice and expert members, including academic and professional perspectives. Findings revealed apprenticeship is co-constructed across individual and social dimensions as members’ collective activity shapes how disciplinary identities and activities are actualized. Implications include the need to reconcile existing connotations of apprenticeship away from novice or expert-led distinctions in recognition of all members’ contributions as well as the importance of broadening conceptions of disciplinary literacy instruction in support of strengthening students’ participatory capacities within and beyond the college classroom.