Composition Course Research Articles

Fractal analysis of biological wastewater treatment efficiency

The purpose of the present research was to enhance the efficiency of biological wastewater treatment through the direct impact on the metabolism of activated sludge. In the course of research, species and quantitative composition of biological community of activated sludge in aeration tanks during wastewater purification process was studied. Comparative analysis was carried out for linen production wastewater and household sewage. Possible application of biological treatment in linen production was evaluated. Proposals were developed on creation of controllable biological treatment facility. In this paper, biological methods are shown to be efficient for household sewage treatment. Comparative analysis was carried out for linen production wastewater and household sewage. Possible application of biological treatment in linen production was evaluated. Proposals were developed on creation of controllable biological treatment facility.

Offering a First-year Composition Classroom for Veterans and Cadets: A Learning-Community Model Case Study

This article discusses my university’s creation of first-year-composition courses designed with a learning community or cohort approach for student-veterans, service-members, and cadets desiring this model. At my locale , neither the standard sections of Composition I nor II had been created to provide a military population with a common student community, customized readings, flexible attendance policies, and seamless communication with university veteran services that might better facilitate the transition to college for some student-veterans. Thus, as writing program administrator, I piloted linked composition courses for a service-member, veteran, and ROTC learning community, with the latter course also enrolling a nontraditional-student population. In a year-long study, I investigated the impact of enrolling military-affiliated students in linked courses within a traditional classroom to interact under a continuing instructor, engage with military-based readings, and opt to write about their military backgrounds. In presenting patterns that emerged, I argue that these experimental learning-community courses, contingent upon some local factors, supported many military-affiliated students’ engagement with first-year composition, as well as facilitated their transition to academia, through a loosely-structured, cohort model promoting aspects of students’ common but broadly-defined identities.

Awakening the Learner Within: Purposeful Prompts and Lifelong Learning Measures in a First-Year Composition Course

Lifelong learning skills have been shown to benefit students during and after college. This paper discusses the use of the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI) in a first-year composition course. Reflective writing assignments and pre- and post-semester ELLI data were used to assess student growth as lifelong learners over the course of a semester. Statistically significant gains in lifelong learning dimensions were made by students in the study as compared to those in a control group who received no direct instruction. The authors reflect on the outcomes of the project for students and instructors and question the general assumptions often made about the outcomes of a college education, namely, whether students gain lifelong learning skills simply by virtue of attending college, or is more instruction on these “intangible” qualities needed?

And Gladly Teach: The Archival Turn’s Pedagogical Turn

This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

Transform Spatial: Making the Case for Spatial Thinking in Higher Education

This white paper argues in favor of an interdisciplinary approach to curriculum design that places greater emphasis on spatial thinking in order to prepare students in higher education for life and careers in the 21st century. While part one of the paper outlines and supports various claims regarding spatial thinking, the second part of the paper proposes an intervention, and introduces the transformed curriculum of a compulsory first-year composition course that emphasizes spatial thinking and experiential learning. Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 59-78

The Contribution of Lexical Diversity to College‐Level Writing

This article reports on a study that investigated the extent to which lexical frequency and lexical diversity contribute to writing proficiency scores on monolingual English‐speaking writers’ and advanced multilingual writers’ academic compositions. The data consist of essays composed by 104 multilingual English learners enrolled in advanced second language writing courses at various intensive English programs and 68 monolingual English‐speaking university students in a first‐year composition course. Three independent raters evaluated the essays according to the TOEFL iBT independent writing rubric. Results from a binary logistic regression reveal that lexical diversity has a significantly greater impact on writing score than lexical frequency. Post hoc analyses show that lexical frequency has only a moderate relationship to lexical diversity, suggesting that diversity of mid‐frequency vocabulary may be more important to writing proficiency than the use of more sophisticated terms that occur less frequently in natural language. Implications for practice suggest that it is not enough to simply teach vocabulary words in the second language composition classroom, but also to guide learners in how to employ these words in a varied manner in their writing.

Exploring the social nature of L2 writing

Using an activity system framework this study examined the social nature of the writing processes by investigating the division of labor in the writing processes of 31 ESL learners. The study involved one of the four major writing assignments in a required first-year composition course for ESL students at a North American university. Data was collected from: (a) A semi-structured interview with each participant, (b) process logs kept by all participants, (c) classroom observation notes, and (d) class materials. Findings indicate that L2 writers used various context-specific affordances derived from division of labor to accomplish their writing task. The study arrived at these findings by creating taxonomies of people who were part of their writing process and examining the influence that these people had on their writing. The findings show that people related to L2 writers within the social space in both academic and non-academic capacities mediate them in non-trivial ways. This mediation renders not only positive but also negative effects on the production of L2 texts. Implications for L2 writing pedagogy and research are discussed.

Promoting academic achievement through the mother tongue and a critically compassionate intellectual praxis

This paper reports on my attempt to create an “additive schooling” situation (Valenzuela in Subtractive Schooling: US Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) for Spanish-dominant students (SDS) at Bronx Community College (BCC). This additive schooling situation was envisioned as space where SDS could thrive using their mother tongue as a resource within the framework of a learning community that promoted a “critically compassionate intellectual praxis” (Cammarota and Romero in Why Bilingual Education? A Summary of Research Findings. San Francisco, CA: Bloomsbury West, 2006). I discuss how I invited SDS students’ mother tongue into the learning process by linking ESL courses that I taught with Spanish composition courses for native speakers, which I took as a language learner. My participation in the Spanish courses allowed the creation of an ethnographic partnership wherein knowledge was co-constructed with my students within a critical academic discourse that welcomed their language and identities. I discuss the impact this pedagogical initiative had on SDS success rates at BCC and suggest ways it can be implemented in other teaching contexts.

Effect of a Mindful Breathing Intervention on Community College Students’ Writing Apprehension and Writing Performance

ABSTRACTMindful breathing has been linked to changes in physiology, but we took the practice further by examining whether a mindfulness breathing intervention, a three-minute breathing exercise marked by focused attention on the sensations of breath, affected writing anxiety, and writing performance measures. In addition, we examined mindful breathing as an intervention for community college students—some of the most at risk and underprepared students in higher education in the United States. We compared Daly Miller Writing Apprehension surveys and narrative writing samples from 277 students enrolled in a freshman composition course at a southeastern community college, half of the class sections were randomly assigned to practice a mindful-breathing technique at the beginning of class sessions. Students in the class sections that practiced mindful-breathing group experienced a statistically significant decrease in writing apprehension and mechanical error scores from pre- to post-test when compared to students in the comparison class sections.

Chinese Students Negotiating L2 English Writing Identity: Navigating Introductory Composition at a U.S. University

This small scale ethnographic study explores the L2 English academic writing identity negotiation of three Chinese students within the context of an introductory composition course at a U.S. Midwestern university focused on the needs of international students. Through individual interviews and classroom observations, it was investigated whether participants’ previous language learning experiences and current language ideologies play a significant role in their attitudes towards acquiring L2 academic literacy skills in English. Another point of interest was how these students shape their ‘imagined communities’ in respect to second language writing and whether they experience any kind of ‘inferiority of identity’. Resultsconcluded that students were implicitly and explicitly aware of English as a dominant discourse and were able to describe specific stylistic differences between Chinese and English argumentative writing that seemed to have some effect on their conscious development of thought patterns in organizing writing assignments in a given socio‐‐‐cultural setting. Further notice of how L2 students accommodate or resist English academic writing conventions and how they may self‐‐‐marginalize their own L1 merits greater attention.

What can regular and timely student feedback tell us about the teaching and learning processes?

Most studies on the evaluation of teaching focus on the input (teacher traits) or the output (student-generated products) of the teaching and learning processes. This article is based on a case study that examines the three components of teaching and learning: input, output and process. It presents a framework for collecting quantitative and qualitative data on the quality of instruction, assessment and feedback, and learning environment in college composition courses to complement the feedback provided by the end-of-course student evaluations of teaching for the purpose of monitoring, guiding, and improving instruction.

The role of scaffold interactivity in supporting self-regulated learning in a community college online composition course

This study addressed some of the challenges of supporting self-regulated learning in community college online English composition. This course used a flexible learning design, providing a choice of procedural scaffolds to support self-regulation of learning tasks by students. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the use of two procedural scaffolds, a custom-designed, interactive checklists tool and a non-interactive calendar tool, and the core assignment submission and metacognition of online English composition students. Measures included clickstream data for procedural scaffold usage, a count of core assignment submissions, and Metacognitive Awareness Inventory scores. Results indicated that use of the custom-designed interactive checklists tool better supported submission of core assignments by students than the non-interactive calendar tool. While metacognition awareness scores increased across the study, no significant association with procedural scaffold use was found. Implications for future practice support the continued and extended use of interactive procedural scaffolds to support online students through task completion for complex processes such as academic writing.

장르 기반 영어 학습자 코퍼스의 이메일 오류 분석: 학부 교양영어 교육을 중심으로

As a preliminary study for the effective development of a genre-focused English learner corpus, this article aims to investigate most frequent error types and their frequencies in English emails written by undergraduate freshmen in South Korea. Data for this study include English emails of 86 Korean students majoring in humanities or social science in a university located in Daegu. With the rise of Internet, ESL/EFL education has witnessed a growing interest in teaching email usage in composition courses, as it provides a variety of opportunities to evaluate language abilities including interpersonal and pragmatic abilities. The present article revealed that the most frequent error type was concerned with style, such as capitalization (28.7%) and punctuation (7.8%), which was followed by determiner deletion (6.3%), genre convention such as closing (3%), countability of nouns (3%), and verb choice (2.7%). Different error types and frequencies were identified according to different English proficiency levels (Korean SAT and TOEIC), which evidenced the need to include the English proficiency level annotation in the corpus design and to focus on different types of errors in class in accordance with learners’ proficiency levels.

Feedback 2.0 in online writing instruction: Combining audio-visual and text-based commentary to enhance student revision and writing competency

The continued increase in the number of students participating in online degree programs has led to an increase in the number of students taking online composition courses. Currently, most online writing programs replicate approaches used in face-to-face composition courses and simply transfer them to the online learning environment. However, there is a need to develop teaching practices and approaches to feedback designed specifically for online learning environments. This quasi-experimental study examined whether the use of a combination of audio-visual and text-based commentary in online writing courses was more effective in promoting substantive revision and improvement in students’ writing than the use of text-based commentary alone. The multimodal feedback group showed higher rates of improvement in areas of audience and purpose between first and final drafts than students in the text-only group. Results also indicated that receiving a combination of audio-visual and text-based feedback had a marginally statistically significant effect on categories of content (p = .08) and final draft quality (p = .06); the effect for both categories was considered medium, partial η2 = .07. While most previous studies on audio or video feedback have focused on student perceptions of the feedback, this study, by focusing on efficacy, has helped generate empirical data regarding the pedagogical usefulness of audiovisual feedback in online learning environments.

Comparing L1 and L2 Texts and Writers in First‐Year Composition

Scholars have at various points discussed the needs of second language (L2) writers enrolled in “mainstream” composition courses where they are mixed with native (L1) English speakers. Other researchers have investigated the experiences of L2 writers in mainstream classes and the perceptions of their instructors about their abilities and needs. Little research, however, has directly compared L1 and L2 students (mostly Generation 1.5) taking composition classes together. For this article, the researchers collected writing samples from 56 L1 and 74 L2 students enrolled in a university (mainstream) first‐year composition course. Using a mixed‐methods design, they analyzed the texts for language error counts as well as measures of lexical and syntactic complexity; they juxtaposed these with insights from survey responses of both groups of writers and in‐depth interviews. They conclude that, although L1 and L2 students have much in common, the L2 students had observed and (self‐)perceived language needs that were significantly different from those of the L1 students. These included differences in linguistic accuracy, lexical diversity, and language‐related anxiety. Implications for pedagogy include recommendations for teaching L2 writers to self‐edit for common patterns of errors and sensitize students to the value of nuanced and purposeful lexical variety in their writing.

Uniting the Pre-Health Humanities with the Introductory Composition Course.

Drawing on my experiences at a teaching-focused university, I show how locating the health humanities in first-year or introductory composition courses improves learning and offers an economical, flexible, and far-reaching approach to bringing a health humanities education to all baccalaureate-level learners, regardless of whether they aspire to careers in the health professions. In terms of improving learning, health humanities composition courses support the disciplinary aims of both fields. Accessible, relevant issues in the health humanities, such as interventions in health debates or representations of illness and healthcare settings, nourish the cognitive and social conditions needed to develop college-level writing skills. The health humanities' emphases on interdisciplinarity and suspending judgment also inform students' writing abilities. Composition trains students to write rhetorically by considering purpose, context, genre, mode, and other factors when addressing an audience. This approach to writing helps pre-health humanists communicate intentionally and compassionately about health topics as well as the larger issues they call into question. Because students enroll in health humanities composition courses at an early, formative moment in their studies, they are poised to carry or "transfer" their knowledge to other courses, including those that might prepare them for the workforce.

Self-Directed Language Development: A Study of First-Year College Writers

Students in first-year composition (FYC) courses are expected to control the mechanics, vocabulary, style, and grammatical accuracy of their writing. Yet language development support, particularly that of grammar instruction in US FYC courses, has largely disappeared in recent decades, due in part to suppositions that students implicitly know grammar. This assumption is problematic given the increasing number of multilingual writers enrolling in US schools with observed needs for explicit language instruction. The present study explores whether first- and second-language writers of English perceived a need for language instruction and whether they wanted or expected it. Students from 12 sections of FYC were asked in surveys and interviews about their prior language learning experiences and current self-perceived language needs and then were asked to complete one of two self-directed language development projects (LDPs): an online, self-selected grammar and usage study project or journal entries focusing on vocabulary/style in texts they had read. Student work was collected, analyzed, and supplemented with students’ end-of-term observations and preferences about self-directed LDPs. Our findings reveal that students overwhelmingly wanted and expected language instruction and were largely positive about both types of LDPs, but they felt that language instruction should be offered in multiple delivery methods beyond just self-study. With these findings in mind, we offer pedagogical suggestions for addressing the perceived and real needs for language development of linguistically diverse FYC students.

Correlations Between Information Literacy Competency and Student Writing Performance in an English 101 course at an Urban Community College

This paper examines, and attempts to quantify, the effects of acquiring Information Literacy skills and their subsequent impact on student performance in English Composition courses at Queensboroug...

Writing Language: Composition, the Academy, and Work

This paper argues that while college composition courses are commonly charged with remediating students by providing them with the literacy skills they lack, they may instead be redefined as providing the occasion for rewriting language and knowledge. By bringing to the fore the dependence of language and knowledge on the labor of writing, a pedagogy of recursion, mediation, and translation of knowledge through writing and revision counters neoliberalism’s commodification of knowledge and language, and offers an alternative justification for continuing education as the occasion for students to remediate language and knowledge through writing.

Chat Transcript Analysis Reveals that Undergraduate Students are Open to Instruction, While Instructors and Librarians Care About Supporting Student Learning

A Review of:
 Jacoby, J., Ward, D., Avery, S., & Marcyk, E. (2016). The value of chat reference services: A pilot study. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 16(1), 109-129. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2016.0013 
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To investigate student, instructor, and librarian perspectives of chat reference service in the context of first-year undergraduate students conducting research for an introductory composition course.
 
 Design – Focus groups, individual interviews, and surveys.
 
 Setting – A large, public university in the United States of America.
 
 Subjects – 57 library reference providers, 36 instructors of an introductory composition course, and approximately 936 undergraduate students in certain sections of the introductory composition course who were assigned a specific research project.
 
 Methods – In spring of 2014, all participants were invited via email to respond to an anonymous chat transcript of a librarian interacting with a student working on his or her research project. Study participants could participate via a brief survey or by taking part in a focus group or individual interview. The invited instructors were asked to forward the invitation to the students in their sections, and reminder emails were sent two weeks after the initial email.
 
 Main Results – Nine instructors, 24 students, and 25 library reference providers participated in the study, representing a response rate of 25%, 3% (estimated), and 44%, respectively. The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of key themes that were derived from both the focus groups or individual interviews and the survey questions. The themes were: students as novice researchers, question negotiation, open and closed questions, instruction, speed and convenience, customer service, and referrals. The theme of “students as novice researchers” is based on student comments related to their frustrations of being inexperienced researchers, as well as librarian comments on strategies for helping these students. Opinions regarding the traditional reference interview, including specific techniques that made the interaction successful, were categorized as “question negotiation.” The “open and closed questions” theme focused on feedback on the types of questions used by librarians in the reference interview. Several components related to chat and instruction were encompassed within the “instruction” theme, including whether those participating in the study were conscious of librarians providing instructions via chat and whether it was deemed valuable; the impact of a library instruction session in which students participated; and identification of missed teachable moments during the chat. The “speed and convenience” theme represented thoughts regarding the balance of instruction and librarian support of news skills, with the student expectation of having their question answered quickly and efficiently. The “customer service” theme focused on the service quality of the reference transaction, while the “referrals” theme encompassed thoughts related to whether students were referred to subject specialists, writing specialists, instructors, or if there was a lack of a referral altogether.
 
 Conclusion – Based on the research results, the authors highlighted the importance of the interconnectedness of teaching that is done in the classroom, in library instruction sessions, and on the reference desk, as all three types of instruction should align. Furthermore, because students are open to instruction via the chat service when they are creating and revising their research question and delving into subject research, chat can be viewed as a key teaching and learning opportunity.