Composition Course Research Articles

Between Technological Endorsement and Resistance: The State of Online Writing Centers

Joanna Wolfe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, human-computer interaction, and research methods. She is author of the forthcoming textbook Team Writing from Bedford-St. Martin's, a guide to writing collaboratively and working on a team. Her previous scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

Seasonal and daily time course of the 13C composition in soil CO2 efflux recorded with a tunable diode laser spectrophotometer (TDLS)

Temporal variations of carbon isotope composition of soil CO2 efflux (FS and δ13CFS) at different time scales should reflect both temporal variations of the climate conditions that affect canopy functioning and temporal changes in the relative contribution of autotrophic respiration to total FS. A tunable diode laser spectrophotometer (TDLS) was installed in the Hesse forest (northeast of France) early during the 2007 growing season to determine the seasonal and daily variability in δ13CFS. This method, based on the measurement of the absorption of an infrared laser emission at specific wave lengths of the 13CO2 and 12CO2, allows the continuous monitoring of the two isotopologues. The concentrations of the two isotopologues in FS were continuously monitored from June to November 2007 using chamber method and Keeling plots drawn from nocturnal accumulation of CO2 below the canopy. These TDLS measurements and isotope ratio mass spectrometer based Keeling plots gave very similar values of δ13CFS, showing the reliability of the TDLS system in this context. Results were analysed with regard to seasonal and daily changes in climatic and edaphic variables and compared with the δ13C of CO2 respired by roots, litter and soil incubated under controlled conditions. Pronounced daily as well as seasonal variations in δ13CFS were recorded (up to 1.5‰). The range of variation of δ13CFS was of the same order of magnitude at both diurnal and seasonal scales. δ13CFS observed in the field fluctuated between values of litter and of root respiration recorded during incubation, suggesting that temporal (and probably spatial) variations were associated with changes in the relative contribution of the two compartments during the day and during the season.

Female Marine Recruit Training

The US Marine Corps (USMC) is an elite military organization. Marine recruit training (RT) is a physically and psychologically intense 13-wk-long course designed to transform civilians into Marines through shared hardship and arduous training. Our laboratory conducted a study of female recruits in USMC RT that assessed the nature and the extent of cognitive, nutritional, and physical changes that occur during this unique period of structured mental and physical training. During RT, mood state was assessed every 4 wk with a standardized questionnaire, the POMS. Body composition was assessed with dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry every 4 wk, and blood samples were collected for assessing metabolic status at the start and at the completion of training. At the beginning of RT, approximately 1 wk after arrival at the training facility, levels of several negative mood states assessed by the POMS, depression, anxiety, fatigue, anger, and confusion, were considerably higher than POMS norms for age-matched, female college students. However, over the course of RT, these mood states gradually declined until, by the completion of training, they were substantially lower than college norms. Body composition changed dramatically, with muscle mass increasing by 2.5 +/- 0.2 kg on average and fat declining by 4.7 +/- 0.4 kg. There were also significant changes in several biochemical parameters associated with nutritional and physical status, particularly LDL cholesterol, free fatty acids, and cortisol. Other factors, such as total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and glucose, were more stable. Over the course of USMC RT, mood and body composition improved substantially and dramatically, an indication of the effectiveness of USMC RT for altering the physical and the cognitive status of trainees.

A PBL Approach for Teaching Complex Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Skills in Higher Education

ABSTRACT This study explored the use of a problem-based learning (PBL) approach for teaching information and communication technology (ICT) skills to first-year students. Two questions were posed. The first addressed the ICT skill needs of 20 students enrolled in a first-year composition course. The second focused on the use of PBL to facilitate ICT skill acquisition. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed. Results indicate that ICT instruction was most useful when: (1) students defined/interpreted information needs by recalling prior knowledge and experiences; (2) those interpretations were tested, refined, rejected, or revised for a specific purpose; (3) access to resources and tools (artifacts, symbols, and language) were readily available; and (4) formative feedback supported critical thinking about the information retrieval process. These findings provided important insights into using PBL to facilitate and reinforce learning.

“I Don't Teach Reading”: Critical Reading Instruction in Composition Courses

Recent studies indicate that many entering freshmen are not prepared for the demands of college reading, yet most higher education institutions do not require stand alone reading courses. Although critical reading is an often-cited objective of some college composition courses, little research exists that describes how composition instructors teach critical reading strategies. This study examined ways that critical reading is taught in freshman composition courses at one university by generating data from teacher interviews and document analysis. The data suggests that reading pedagogy varies widely among composition instructors and that critical reading was generally not taught explicitly by participants in this study.

Streaming video to enhance students’ reflection in dance education

This paper presents an evaluation case study that describes the experiences of 15 students and 2 teachers using a video-based learning environment, DiViDU, to facilitate students’ daily reflection activities in a composition course and a ballet course. To support dance students’ reflection processes streaming video was applied as follows: video editing and viewing for facilitating students in describing their practice; writing online self-assessments about the experiences captured on video to support students in evaluating their practice; online peer-feedback activities concerning the recorded practice for facilitating students in learning from multiple perspectives. In the composition course eight students reflected on their choreographic work, which was performed by their peer students. In the ballet course seven students reflected on themselves practicing the ballet technique. Data about the streaming video facilitation were collected after the completion of the reflection assignments using semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that students in both courses considered steaming video as effective for carrying out self-evaluations. The usefulness of video and online peer-feedback for other reflection processes differed among the courses in students’ view. The teachers considered streaming video generally useful for all the reflection processes of their students; however they also indicated some shortcomings.

How to Be; What to Do: Character and Action in Ralph Shapey's String Quartet No. 6

Ralph Shapey wrote a large body of dense, intense, and to those who know it, deeply compelling music over a career spanning nearly 60 years. Highly contrapuntal, employing extremes of register and virtuosity, this music is nevertheless hyper-lyrical and unfolds in ways that allow the dedicated listener to take in its larger gestures on first hearing while rewarding a close attention to its details on subsequent engagement. The article illustrates several features of Shapey's music through an examination of his String Quartet No. 6. This is prepared by a consideration of some of Shapey's own words about his compositional procedures, as found in his volume A basic course in music composition, and in an interview conducted by Stefan Wolpe.

Advancing Critical Thinking and Information Literacy Skills in First Year College Students

ABSTRACT This article provides a case study of recent curriculum development in a freshman skills program which integrates critical thinking and English composition as linked courses at Gonzaga University. Known as “thought and expression” courses, this block of courses, which also includes speech communication, can be taken by students separately or in a linked cohort with the same twenty students in each class. In linked courses, faculty are generally aware of each others' course topics and assignments, and they meet to discuss student progress and look for opportunities for curriculum integration. In this case study, library faculty were included in the instructional team, and information literacy skills that relate to critical thinking were integrated into the goals of the critical thinking and English composition courses. Faculty involved in the courses believe that integrating library skills into course goals adds coherence to the curriculum; it also helps students to achieve the developmental goals of the learning community created by this course model.

Step by Step through the Scholarly Conversation: A Collaborative Library/Writing Faculty Project to Embed Information Literacy and Promote Critical Thinking in First Year Composition at Oregon State University

ABSTRACT At Oregon State University, writing instructors and librarians collaboratively teach research writing and information literacy in first year composition courses. A four-week unit focuses on the connections between critical thinking, writing and learning, and information literacy. This article describes the process of developing, implementing, and refining this collaborative curriculum. By using assignments and texts that model a recursive critical research and writing process for students, librarians and writing instructors help students think more deeply and critically about their topics.

A Generation in Transition

Generation 1.5 students are those who appear fully conversant in American English and culture but are still in the process of learning English when they enter college. This study, based on the findings of a 51-question survey administered to 285 students in a first-year college composition course, examines the effect and role that public libraries have in the success of Generation 1.5 college writers. The findings raise questions about the role public libraries play in preparing students for college. The article suggests reasons for heavy public library use by Generation 1.5 college students, even when academic libraries are available to them.

Meeting in the margins: Effects of the teacher–student relationship on revision processes of EFL college students taking a composition course

Using a case study approach, we explored the role of the teacher–student relationship in how a teacher made written comments on students’ writing and in how students responded to these comments in revision. The focal participants were one non-native teacher of English and two of the students enrolled in her six-week composition course in a Korean university. Data sources included formal, informal, and text-based interviews, class observations, and writing samples with teacher written comments. Data analysis focused on the comments the teacher made on the students’ drafts and on how and why the students did or did not use her written comments. Findings showed that one student who had built a trusting relationship with his teacher faithfully used her written feedback in revision, thereby improving his drafts, whereas the other student who had difficulty trusting her did not respond to her feedback positively. Consequently, his drafts did not improve as much as those of other students. We argue that establishing a trusting relationship between teacher and students may be fundamental to the effective use of feedback in revision. Results encourage a re-envisionment of the cognitive process model of revision to add the role of the relationship between teacher and student.

Analyzing Students’ Perceptions of Their Learning in Online and Hybrid First-Year Composition Courses

This article presents a study of first-year composition (fyc) courses that were taught in both online and hybrid formats in order to determine students’ perceptions on how much they learned in them. The students’ responses to an extensive survey, in which they analyzed their experiences in their courses, point to larger questions about our individual pedagogical assumptions as well as larger issues related to the structures of first-year composition courses and their required status.

A Study of Voice-Recognition Software as a Tool for Teacher Response

Voice-recognition technology (VRT) promises ease of use in responding to student writing, but its impact on writing processes and the quality of teacher commentary is unclear. This article details the results of a study undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of VRT in responding to student writing. Over the course of two semesters, in response to texts written by students in his first-year college composition course, one of the authors composed 58 end comments, alternating between two methods of composition: typing on a keyboard and dictating directly into text by means of VRT. While his writing processes in the respective modalities differed dramatically, particularly in terms of revision, the quality of the resulting texts appeared roughly the same: A detailed content analysis of the comments, using Richard Straub and Ronald Lunsford's (1995) typology, revealed significant variation in only 1 of 25 variables, measured as a proportion of total words. Meanwhile, students surveyed indicated they found few differences between the typed and dictated comments in terms of their usefulness, clarity, and tone. These findings, along with a comparison of time on task and user impressions of the two modalities, indicate that VRT represented a valuable tool for producing end comments that the user was able to dictate fluently, but that the technology was ineffective for the limited editing and revising attempted within the design of the study.

Splitting the Cartesian Hair

It may be useful to think of doubt and belief as games; it certainly takes the pressure off for those of us who were raised in the old existentialist order. However, they are not games that play very well on the prairie. In the evening of my life as a rhetorician, I am haunted by the voices of two students: first, Sam, who came from a farm in southern Minnesota, who turned up in my first-year composition course. When I asked him to support an argument with several points of evidence, he broke a term’s laconic silence to state: “You shouldn’t ask a man his reasons. That’s insulting. You better assume he has them.” Then Arlo, selfidentified as a right-wing libertarian, who resisted Rogerian rhetoric, the believing game writ large. I had asked him to lay out a fellow student’s position supporting gun control and try to find common ground. He steadily refused. “If I laid out my opponent’s argument sympathetically,” he said, “I’d be honor-bound to consider changing my mind.” These students haunt me not because their positions are comic, though they are, or unassailable, which they are not, but because they cast the shadow of a kind of black mass in the church of our profession. The anthropologist and philosopher Loren Eiseley, in the later years of his own professional journey, was tormented by a kind of trickster figure, “masked and demonic,” which rose up to mock his every pretension. In his essay “The Star Thrower,” Eiseley associates this apparition with “the trickster as I have seen his role performed among the remnant of a savage people long ago.” Perhaps in southern Minnesota, for all I know. This is how Eiseley characterizes the figure he calls “a jokester present at the most devout of ceremonies”: This creature never laughed; he never made a sound. Painted in black, he followed silently behind the officiating priest, mimicking, with the added flourish of a little whip, the gestures of the devout one. His timed and stylized posturings conveyed a derision infinitely more formidable than actual laughter. (175)

Writing and Learning in the Health Sciences: Rhetoric, Identity, Genre, and Performance

WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM linkages are generally acknowledged to help students improve as writers and engage more deeply in disciplinary course content. However, the extent to which the literacy skills that are taught in general writing courses transfer to the specific writing needs of a particular discipline remains a debatable issue. Referring to first year writing courses, Amy Devitt notes that writing courses “have been attacked as not useful, in part because of a potential lack of transferability of the general writing skills learned in composition courses to the particular writing tasks students will later confront” ( ). Margaret Mansfield similarly maintains that attempts to reproduce real world writing in the classroom are “intrinsically doomed” ( ), as do many of the essays in Joseph Petraglia’s collection, Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, which question the value of what Petraglia terms GWSI (General Writing Skills Instruction). However, an important benefit of a cross curricular model, one that receives little attention in writing across the curriculum scholarship, is that linked courses not only help students improve as writers, but they can also enable students to understand that “when people learn, they don’t take on new knowledge so much as a new identity” (Lindquist ). Identity is closely linked with writing, but WAC tends to focus primarily on the actual writing, not on the role writers play in a discourse community. In this essay, we discuss a successful linkage between a writing class and a class in Health Sciences that used rhetoric, with particular emphasis on the concepts of identity, genre, and performance, to help students gain insight into the role of writing in the field of Public Health and understand what it means to be a Public Health professional. Differences in students’ responses to essays written at the beginning of the semester as

Conceptualizing Cognitive Skills Developed during Video Game Play: A Case Study in Teaching Composition

While video games have been much maligned in the popular press, a number of scholars have begun to explore the positive side of these games, especially in terms of learning. Some critics have analyzed video games and the act of game play as complex, cultural texts. In college courses, such as composition, in which one goal is the development of rhetorical skills like analysis, video games and game play can be used as texts that are both accessible to students and rich in meaningful information. In this article, the author presents a case study of a composition course she developed using the book Everything Bad is Good for You, in which Steven Johnson focuses on popular media, such as video games. Through exposure to Johnson's complex discussion and by drawing on their own experience and observations, students were able to think and write critically about abstract concepts and produce their own meaningful analyses.

Tenure, Promotion, and Textual Scholarship at the Teaching Institution

To begin, I want to clarify a term I use here as short hand for those institutions that generally focus on undergraduate rather than graduate education, that are thus categorized by the Carnegie sys tem as either Master's or Baccalaureate institutions, and that are therefore distinct in this way from research universities. I am not using the term to suggest that teaching is the only activity such institutions find important, nor am I using the term to imply that teaching is an activity that research institutions devalue. Teaching is an important activity at research institu tions, and indeed high-quality teaching?even of undergraduates?may be found there, no matter what certain polemicists and pundits say. Likewise, scholarship is an important activity at teaching institutions, and indeed high-quality scholarship goes on there too, no matter what others, includ ing some of our colleagues at research institutions, might think. My own institution, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, is classified in the cur rent Carnegie Classification system as a Master's institution in the smaller programs subcategory. At Mansfield, English faculty members teach four courses per semester, two of which are usually composition courses. We are a unionized faculty, contractually obligated to demonstrate teaching effectiveness, scholarly growth, and university service in order to have our appointments renewed and ultimately to earn tenure and promotion. Now that you know where I'm coming from, I'll arrive at my main point as quickly as I can. Textual scholarship is devalued across academia,

Critical Thinking and Reading

From freshman composition courses to high school exit exams, the term critical thinking is everywhere. The educationally ubiquitous term has been defined as criticism that combines research, knowledge of historical context, and balanced judgment.In theory then, critical thinking should be taught in virtually every course in the humanities. In practice, however, my years as a high school English teacher, as well as my decades on the other side of the desk, have proven that the lofty title is a gross misnomer, conveniently obscuring the fact that the majority of our schools fail to teach critical thinking and, as a result, the majority of our populace does not practice it.

Teaching proofreading skills as a means of reducing composition errors

Foreign language teachers have long been frustrated by learners' written errors. Traditional approaches to the problem—grammar instruction and error feedback—when used alone are not effective. Explicit instruction in proofreading provides a missing link. When instruction in proofreading is embedded in grammar instruction and when learners use error feedback to detect, diagnose and correct errors, the writing–grammar connection becomes more obvious and learners can take better control of their own accuracy. This article presents instructional methods for teaching proofreading skills to fifth-semester college-level students of Spanish, enrolled in a grammar and composition course, but they can be adapted to other languages and levels. It includes strategies for developing general proofreading skills as well as strategies specifically tailored to the needs of second language learners.

Communication Skills for the Processing of Words, 5th Edition

This text aims to prepare students for entry-level jobs and foster their career progress after they enter the workplace. The focus of this book is not as broad as the typical introductory text on business communication. However, this book could be the right choice for an advanced business writing course in a high school or an introductory business writing course in a college, university, or technical school. This book might also work well as a supplement in a postsecondary business communication course for use by students who either have not completed a 1st-year composition course or who have completed that course without mastering grammar, mechanics, and style. This textbook includes 18 units: 8 discuss specific types of punctuation (e.g., commas and colons); 7 cover usage and mechanics (e.g., capitalization and numbers); and 3 cover grammar (e.g., subject and verb agreement).