Composition Course Research Articles

Not Just Anywhere, Anywhen: Mapping Change Through Studio Work

In this autoethnographic, institutional narrative, we describe the evolution of a Studio program at an open-access, regional campus of a state university. The Studio, first conceptualized by Grego and Thompson, is a one-credit writing workshop taken by students concurrently enrolled in a composition course. Developing this program necessitated incur- sion into an institutional landscape that we learned was not transparent, unclaimed, or uncontested. In remaking that landscape, we came to understand the crucial roles of space and place, power and colonization, in institutional change and in the teaching of writing. Institutional spaces are never transparent, unclaimed, or uncontested; thus remaking an institutional landscape involves issues of power and colonization. Postcolonial theories helped us think about the shifting and asymmetrical relations of power embroiling us as we struggled to bring about change in our campus's approach to at-risk students. We argue that the contradictions and confusions students experience in the university embody the work in Studio, and that these contradictions must not be smoothed out in any narrative we write or theorizing we attempt.

Teaching composition online: Whose side is time on?

Although online education is at times envisioned as a time-saving enterprise, a recent, mostly anecdotal consensus indicates that, in fact, online education is more labor intensive for the instructor, if not for the student as well. Previous studies both confirm and deny this consensus because they examine different design paradigms that resist comparison. This study compares the workload for a student-centered paradigm in one face-to-face (F2F) and three online sections of the same composition course, and finds that teaching composition online takes almost twice as much time as face-to-face teaching. The major causes of this disparity appear to be hardware and applications, instructional design, and student learner characteristics.

Building Blocks and Learning

Using John Holland’s model of complex adaptive systems, this paper explores how nonnative speakers of English learned to participate and to write in a first-year university rhetoric and composition course. Of particular interest is the emergence of students’ internal models for writing and other class tasks through the reproduction and cross-over of conceptual building blocks, showing that much of learning and creativity is due to recombining what is known rather than invention de novo. The findings in this paper suggest that educators should design curricula around core conceptual building blocks that can be combined in various ways across novel situations and that can lead to an ongoing emergence of new building blocks.

Race, Composition, and "Our English": Performing the Mother Tongue in a Daily Theme Assignment at Harvard, 1886-87

In the nineteenth century, the philological concept of the mother tongue assumed that language was strongly linked with race. The adoption of English as the medium of instruction in the US and the vigorous promotion of English as a subject in the university curriculum were predicated on the importance of protecting English as a mother tongue and the racialized values it was thought to embody. In 1886-78 daily theme writers in Barrett Wendell's English 12 composition course at Harvard reiterated and also questioned received statements about language use and race.

Bridging the Gap between Upper‐Division Writing and German Studies Courses with Katja von Garnier's Bandits

The study of female bandits in a German composition course sounds exciting for it evokes the notion that the course will involve suspense, crime and women, topics usually reserved for mainstream American culture with male heroes in leading roles. In fact, a section of the course is about women and crime, women in society, and women on the screen. It is also about writing in a foreign language and various procedures involved in the writing process: free writing, getting organized, structural exercises, to name only a few of the many steps in teaching composition in any classroom. Furthermore, the course instructs students on media literacy, an important skill in today's society as well as in German Studies courses. In the following pages, I describe a teaching unit that incorporates Katja von Garnier's film Bandits in an upper-division German writing course with fifteen to twenty students. Generally speaking, the students' speaking and writing abilities vary from intermediate-mid to intermediate-high levels (the few exceptions are students with study abroad experiences, an occasional native speaker, and/or students from non-German speaking European countries with advanced German language skills). 1 Students enroll in this course after their first semes-

Is it the Technology or the Teacher? A Comparison of Online and Traditional English Composition Classes

Recent reviews of the literature on distance learning have reached two general conclusions. First, students are about as satisfied with the quality of their education in distance-learning (DL) classes as they are in traditional or face-to-face (FTF) classes. Second, students perform about as well in DL classes as they do in FTF classes. We examine this finding of “no significant difference” in a study of students at a public university in the Southeast who were enrolled in online and FTF versions of the same English Composition course. We looked at three student outcomes: satisfaction, learning, and participation in classroom discussion. We found that being in an online class had a positive effect on satisfaction and participation, but no effect on learning even when we controlled for instructor behaviors and classroom characteristics. We attribute the positive effect of being in an online class on student satisfaction—which directly contradicts the no-significant-difference assumption—to the way in which synchronous instruction mimics the traditional classroom. Our findings attest to the importance of both technology and instruction on student satisfaction, learning, and participation.

A Radical Step: Implementing A Critical Information Literacy Model

The weakness of the print-based bibliographic instruction model is its focus on format of the information source over the type of information the source contains. Drawing from the critical literacy movement in the education literature, this article presents an example of a critical information literacy model as applied to the research paper component of a first-year composition course. In this model, students work from their own experiences as they are prepared to make predictive judgments about the information they will need.

Time course of total and distrectual weight gain after refeeding in anorexia nervosa.

Anorectic patients who achieve complete recovery from the eating disorder can obtain a favorable psychosocial outcome but the long-term nutritional outcome is ill-defined. We investigated the time course of total and distrectual body composition during and after refeeding in 32 female patients with anorexia nervosa. Patients were enrolled at their lowest weight (T0) and re-examinated after a 15% weight gain (at a mean of 3 months, T1; n=17) and after 3 years of stable weight recovery (T2; n=8). At T2 patients were compared to a control group of 8 healthy females matched for age and body mass index. All subjects underwent dual X-ray absorptiometry and anthropometry at each visit. At T0, the 32 subjects were at 61%+/-8% of ideal body weight (IBW) with severe reductions in fat mass (FM; 7.1%+/-4.5%), fat free mass (FFM) and bone mineral content (BMC). At T2, the 8 subjects had gained 40% of initial weight, but remained at 85.1%+/-7.7% of IBW ( p<0.01 vs. controls), with a percent FM comparable to that of controls and an absolute FFM still deficient. BMC did not improve at T2 and remained 79% of that in controls. FM depletion was more severe in the limbs than in the trunk and at T2 the trunk/limb FM ratio remained greater than that in controls. These data strongly suggest that continued nutritional surveillance and support is necessary throughout these patients' lives, even after correction of the psychiatric illness and of severe underweight.

Who Killed Annabel Lee? Writing about Literature in the Composition Classroom

riting about literature in composition classes has a long and vexed history, as readers of College English especially will know. Few issues in composition pedagogy invite more debate, because few issues speak so directly to who teaches composition and to why it is taught. On the one hand, teachers trained in literature continue to make up the largest source of staffing for first-year composition courses, and naturally they want to bring their particular expertise to the writing classroom. Also, as many historians of the discipline have pointed out, from as far back as the rise of the English department in the early twentieth century, when first-year programs began to move their students away from the study of classical rhetoric and into an engagement with literature in the vernacular, English teachers have longed to interest their students in the best and most exciting writing in the postclassical tradition (see Berlin; Corbett; Gamer; Horner; Parker; Scholes; Steinberg). On the other hand, the reemergence of rhetoric and the refocusing of first-year writing on the growing discipline of composition in the second half of the twentieth century have thrown down the challenge of pragmatics: core courses in composition should be devoted to more practical writing matters like planning, drafting, revising, using data, evaluating sources, reading critically, interpreting evidence, solving problems in writing, understanding and applying the rhetorical and formal conventions of texts, becoming good collaborators (Lindemann, Freshman Composition 313), not that richest and most intellectually challenging of human arts, literary texts. Lively and even passionate debate has resulted, chronicled most notably in the pages of College English (March 1993, March 1995) and other scholarly venues but

Paradigm Clashes Among Basic Writing Teachers: Sources of Conflict and a Call for Change

Ann Del Principe is a full-time English Instructor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. She teaches developmental writing and reading as well as courses in composition and literature, and is completing her Ph.D. in English Education at New York University. Her dissertation is a study of how secondary-school English teachers’ perceptions of their students’ social class influence their teaching decisions.

Who Killed Annabel Lee? Writing about Literature in the Composition Classroom

The author reopens the vexed question of the use of literature in first–ear composition courses to suggest that reading and writing about literature can empower students to construct their own interpretations of cultural artifacts rather than deferring to canonical knowledge. Using his students’ work with Poe’s “Annabel Lee” as an example, he shows how such a practice can work if it places the work in a context appropriate to the literacies of first–year students and privileges the knowledge they bring with them to the academy.

Why teach “research as a conversation” in freshman composition courses? A metaphor to help librarians and composition instructors develop a shared model

Ongoing discussion between the Oregon State University (OSU) libraries' acting instruction coordinator and the Assistant Composition Coordinator focuses on improving collaboration between our programs and more effectively integrating the research process into the English composition curriculum. We briefly describe a qualitative analysis of the problems with students' writing that led us to develop a new model for integrating the research and writing processes. We provide our rationale for selecting conversation as a metaphor for research and summarize suggested teaching strategies from the literature that are consistent with this metaphor and approach.

What my Students Heard that I Didn't Know I Said: Reflections on Learner Feedback in a Spanish Composition Course

This study analyzed the implementation of a pre-writing activity that was designed to address L2 student writers' tendency to focus on grammatical accuracy to the exclusion of content and structure. The participants, students in a university-level Spanish composition course, were given a rubric with which to evaluate three previously written compositions. These evaluations, along with a tape-recorded whole group discussion and follow-up questionnaires, constitute the database. The analysis focused on two specific aspects of the pre-writing activity: its impact on learners' views about writing and its usefulness as a pedagogical tool. Though indicating support for the activity, learners' comments also revealed a contradiction between the instructor's reportedly student-centred pedagogical beliefs and the teacher-centred nature of the activity. These findings elevate the role of learner feedback beyond evaluative and administrative purposes to constitute a key element in teacher development and professionalization.

Difficult Stories: Service-Learning, Race, Class, and Whiteness

AL s service-learning scholarship enters its second generation, the writing on service-learningl must begin to reflect our own-and our institutions'complex relationship to doing good. Since service-learning is a widely accepted part of many college curriculums, those who write about servicelearning must go beyond the pragmatics of when and how to integrate service into composition courses and begin to theorize who participates in servicelearning programs and why they do so. I hope, as Cynthia Rosenberger writes, that service-learning can create a more just and humane society, and believe that in order to do this service-learning must generate a thoughtful and critical consciousness in all stakeholders (39). We must begin theorizing how service-learning is experienced differently by those from different groups and look closely at the gaps between our theories of service-learning and our theories of subject position(s), of race, class, gender, sexuality, and writing. Recent work

Get it in Writing: Using Politics to Teach Writing and Writing to Teach Politics

Political science professors are often frustrated by the lack of writing ability that their students bring to the classroom and the inadequacy of conventional composition courses in English literature for social science writing tasks. In the last 15 years, many universities and colleges developed programs that foster writing across the curriculum or “in the disciplines” in hopes of addressing such frustrations (Zinser 1988; Monroe 2002). Some political scientists have taken on new roles as writing teachers within these programs. We have designed and taught three semesters of first-year writing seminars focused exclusively on political science material. We are convinced that the content of a political science course is well suited to develop student writing skills. Yet, we also argue that writing is an effective pedagogical technique with which to teach political science. Using survey responses from our students and our own teaching experiences, we highlight assignments that go beyond conventional academic essays and challenge students to write within given political scenarios from the perspective of political journalists, campaign managers, interest groups, bureaucrats, politicians, and even political scientists. These assignments make the strategic writing choices of various actors and interests explicit, helping the students gain a deep and critical understanding of politics from the perspective of actors and the audiences for which they write. We recognize that few if any of our students will become political scientists, yet all students are likely to encounter political writing tasks in their life after college. Our task as teachers of writing and political science is to create assignments that simulate the ways in which ordinary citizens and professionals undertake writing tasks that require a knowledge of politics.

Body composition of patients on a very low-protein diet: a two-year survey with DEXA

Background: It has been reported that patients on a very-low-protein diet (VLPD) maintain a satisfactory nutritional status because of a conserved adaptive metabolic response. However, only few studies have examined the course of nutritional status and body composition in the long term (2 years). Methods: Thirteen stable patients (8 men; age, 55 ± 12 years; glomerular filtration rate (GFR), 15 ± 5 mL/min) receiving a VLPD (0.3 g/kg/day protein) supplemented with amino acids and ketoanalogues (SVLPD) were studied for 2 years. A joint visit with a physician and a dietitian and routine blood and urine analyses were performed every month. Dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), which was used to assess modification of body composition, and GFR (urinary 51Cr-EDTA) and urinary urea and creatinine excretion, which were used to assess nutritional status and compliance to the diet, were assessed every 3 months. Results: GFR, albumin, and prealbumin levels remained stable. Urea urinary excretion decreased at 3 months and then slightly increased at 2 years, but the calculated protein intake remained low at 0.38 ± 0.1 g/kg/day. Energy intake remained close to 30 kcal/kg/day. No significant change was observed for total fat mass or percent fat mass. After an initial decrease, lean body mass stabilized at 6 months and then increased significantly from 6 to 24 months ( P = .02, paired t-test); the mean increase during this period was of 2 kg, that is, 4.6%. Urinary creatinine excretion showed the same profile. Total bone mass, lumbar or hip site bone mass, and Z-score significantly decreased from T0 to 1 and 2 years ( P < .05). Conclusion: This study confirms that a supplemented VLPD is nutritionally safe for a long period, but attention must be paid to bone mass.

“Tryin to make a dolla outa fifteen cent”: Teaching composition with the Internet at an HBCU

Drawing upon nearly a decade of experience, I describe the challenges and advantages of teaching composition with the Internet at Howard University; I also explore the implications for other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). First, I discuss the digital divide that has made it so difficult for many HBCU faculty members and students to access the Internet for composition courses. Next, I describe how students and I succeeded in harnessing the Internet not only to practice high-level writing skills but to “do cultural work”: to establish online “safe houses” for African American English, to collaborate with White North Americans and Black South Africans, and to publish Afrocentric material on the Web. In closing, I identify the pedagogical strategies that turned the Internet into a productive tool for the students in my writing courses.

A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class

In the spring of 2000, following the completion of a Ph.D. specializing in rhetoric and composition, I taught my first literature course: a writing-intensive survey of African American literature. The course, open to all students, regardless of major, used both traditional literature assignments, such as close readings, and more rhetorical assignments that asked the students to “join a conversation” on issues such as gender relations and African American education. After years of teaching argument in rhetoric and composition courses, I was excited about bringing some of the methods that had proved successful in this environment to the literature curriculum: peer review, audience analysis, guidance through the writing process, intensive revision, writing conferences. These were elements of writing instruction that I felt had been missing from my own undergraduate study in English literature, and I was eager to share them with my students. I envisioned transforming the lower-level writing course in literature by guiding students through the writing process and encouraging them to think of their writing in terms of the impact it would have on specific readers. The result was a disaster. Strategies that had elicited thoughtful revision from my rhetoric students fell flat in the literature classroom. For instance, I had had wonderful success with a peer review technique developed by Barbara Sitko (1993) in which students read a peer’s paper aloud and paused at the end of every sentence to summarize the main point of the essay and to predict what would appear next. My composition students had found this

An aspect-oriented framework for developing component-based software with the collaboration-based architectural style

Component-based development (CBD) technique for software has emerged to fulfill the demand on the reuse of existing artifacts. In comparison to traditional object-oriented techniques, CBD can provide more advanced abstraction concepts such as subsystem-level reusability, gross structure abstraction, and global control flow abstraction. Unfortunately, existing software development techniques are not mature enough to make it come true that components developed in the third party can be used in a highly flexible way. It is notable that there are certain kinds of software requirements, such as non-functional requirements, that must be implemented cross-cutting multiple classes, largely losing the modularity in object-oriented design and implementation code. Therefore, it is not easy that components are reused without consideration of their low-level implementation details. In this article, we propose Aspect-Oriented Development Framework (AODF) in which functional behaviors are encapsulated in each component and connector, and particular non-functional requirements are flexibly tuned separately in the course of software composition. To support the modularity for non-functional requirements in component-based software systems, we devise Aspectual Composition Rules (ACR) and Aspectual Collaborative Composition Rule (ACCR). Note that AODF makes component-based software built to provide both supports of modularity and manageability of non-functional requirements such as synchronization, performance, physical distribution, fault tolerance, atomic transaction, and so on. With the Collaboration-Based architectural style, AODF explicitly enables to deal with non-functional requirements at the intra-component and inter-component levels.

Teaching High School Dance Composition: Drawing on our History to Develop an Aesthetic Understanding

Summary A format for helping students develop an aesthetic sense in high school composition and dance appreciation courses is presented. Drawing on dance history, the format uses slightly altered writing tools, developed by the National Urban Alliance, to investigate the historical frame of reference, aesthetic properties, and choreographic intent of dance works. Through the format, students and teachers are challenged to recognize their own aesthetic biases and create work that reflects another choreographer's style. Both the process of investigation and stylistic experimentation leads to a greater appreciation of a variety of dance works, a broadening of one's personal choreographic voice, and a greater general aesthetic understanding.