Freshman Composition Research Articles

“When It’s Outside of You”

Through classroom observations and semi-structured, text-based interviews, this study analyzes the impact of a service-learning first-year composition course on students’ rhetorical knowledge. Students’ own words are used to describe their transformative experiences related to academic writing and community service. As a result of what these students called their “investment” in community organizations, they began to see writing itself as advocacy. This article explains how this commitment to writing as advocacy motivated students to develop transferrable writing knowledge.

Analyzing Writing Style and Adapting to a New Writing Culture: A Teaching Practice

This teaching practice presents a classroom exercise completed in a first-year composition class at an English-medium private university in Lithuania. The course typically takes place in the second semester of the year and is required for all first-year students, who are multilingual but completing their university degree in English. The instructor, a US speaker of English who has a background in US composition studies, leads the exercise that consists of a writing style analysis that examines sentence length, word variety, and sentence emphasis, concluding with a discussion of how students can adapt their writing style to meet the needs of a new audience. The exercise aims to help students understand their writing style and what they need to know to adapt their style to fit the academic writing context in the university.

Uncovering the information literacy skills of first-generation and provisionally admitted students

Librarians have experimented with a variety of instructional models, from one-shots to tutorials to semester-long information literacy courses, to increase the impact of information literacy instruction. This study assessed the information literacy gains of students who participated in the pilot of a new instructional model, in which librarians developed and taught a first-year composition course aimed at first-generation, provisionally-admitted college students. This project demonstrated that this model improved students' performance on a standardized information literacy assessment in comparison with students who received instruction in the form of a one-shot instruction session. The study also explored the information literacy knowledge and skills of students targeted by this approach, including first-year students, first-generation students, and provisionally-admitted students.

Teacher Beliefs and Pedagogical Practices of Integrating Multimodality into First-Year Composition

The study intends to provide insights into First-year Composition (FYC) instructors’ beliefs and practices of integrating multimodal writing into the curriculum. Of particular interest is how the beliefs are translated into practices and how such process is mediated by various factors. The study was conducted with nine graduate teaching assistants at one of the largest public universities in the United States. Data were collected through online surveys, face-to-face interviews, and teaching materials. The study has identified four categories of pedagogical agendas on teaching multimodal writing. In addition, teachers generally lack the coping mechanism against students’ negative affective responses, even if such attitudes were acknowledged as an impediment to learning. We find that different aspects of the belief system have a reciprocal and profound impact on teaching practices and that the supportive institutional culture serves as a positive factor. The article concludes with suggestions for future research and professional development.

Oral Communication in an Integrated STEM and Humanities First-Year Experience

This study looks at Purdue University's Integrated First-Year Experience of Design Thinking in Technology, Fundamentals of Speech Communication, and First-Year Composition and its effects on oral communication. We examined whether this three-course integration inspired by writing-across-the-curriculum and communication-across-the-curriculum would lead students to develop more effective oral communication skills than a nonintegrated course. Frameworks for 21st century skills and the National Association of Colleges and Employers (2017) have pinpointed the importance of oral and written communication skills and initiatives. Still, research has produced mixed results on how well universities are preparing students for the workplace. Our study investigated whether the integrated program had better end-of-semester group oral presentations than student groups enrolled only in our Design Thinking in Technology course. A quasi-experimental design and post-only analysis revealed that integrated sections had more effective oral presentations than the nonintegrated sections

The Rhetoric Conspiracy: Why Rhetoric Is Too Powerful and Had to Be Lobotomized

Historically, rhetoric as an art has been considered both nefarious and weak. In the first part of the paper, the authors describe the “lobotomization” of rhetoric, its true power, and its applications with individuals and organizations. This first part paper describes the historical context of the lobotomization—the separation of “Invention” from the other four canons of rhetoric, leaving rhetoric the basis of Freshman Composition and Public Speaking. It then discusses the power of rhetoric, beginning with the human capacity to name objects and people, resulting in leverage over the action of others. The second part covers the nature of humans and their relationship with language, including the automatic formation of two parts of the rhetorical person: character armor (or identity) and terministic screens (or webs of words). The third part examines organizations through the lens of rhetoric and character armor, leading to the conclusion that organizations are best conceptualized as “tribes” or “tribes of tribes” (depending on their size). Some organizational tribes are “lead”—slow to change, encumbered by politics, fearful, and stressed—with others are “gold”—leadership-embracing, market-dominating, innovation-producing. By working with the entire tribe to determine its purpose (which “is a world of meaning created through language”), and construct “scenes” through which this purpose will resonate outside the tribe, people craft a new drama. From a rhetorical perspective, “organizational alchemy” is replacing one drama with another, resulting in profound change. This process can only be accomplished by a leader (with or without formal authority) designing communication strategies (using all five canons of rhetoric) to move the organization to a more advanced cultural stage.

Feature: Neither Here nor There: A Study of Dual Enrollment Students’ Hybrid Identities in First-Year Composition

This article shares findings from a CCCC-funded grant that focuses on a dual enrollment program in Washington State called Running Start. This model invites high schoolers to take college courses on a college campus. Instructors are frequently advised to treat Running Start participants “as if they were any other college students,” yet as our large-scale survey suggests, these students have complex hybrid identities that warrant greater consideration. Without diluting academic rigor, we call for an enhanced understanding of the “funds of knowledge” (González, Moll, and Amanti) that high schoolers bring to First-Year Composition in the spirit of congruous inclusivity.

Feature: Mapping Dual Credit for College Writing: Signposts from the Oregon Trail

This article locates and describes different versions of dual credit for first-year composition as they occur across Oregon and concludes with recommendations, a call for financial transparency in the funding of dual credit in Oregon, and an invitation to researchers in other states to map dual credit in their own states.

Feature: Finding Value, Building Value: A Dual Enrollment Model That Works

First-year composition faculty have historically cast a skeptical eye on high-school-based dual enrollment FYC. However, when secondary and post-secondary faculty are allowed to build their program together, trusting each other’s expertise and engaging in mutual professional development, enormous value is generated for both sets of faculty and the DE students. This article presents findings, materials, and recommendations from a long-standing successful DE program built on the assumption that college faculty have just as much to learn from their high school colleagues as high school teachers have to learn about teaching college-level writing.

국내 대학 신입생 글쓰기 교육에서의 “글쓰기에 대한 글쓰기” 접근법 적용 가능성 및 방법 고찰

본 연구의 목표는 “글쓰기에 대한 글쓰기(Writing About Writing)” 접근법을 국내 대학 교육에 적용하기 위해 그 초기 수업 방식의 수정 방향 및 방안을 제안하는 것이다. WAW접근법은FYC에서 학습한 쓰기 지식을 다른 학과목으로 전이시키기 위해서 글쓰기의 작동 원리를 추출하는 능력을 함양해야 한다고 주장한다. 이러한 교육적 목표는 국내 대학의FYC에도 시사하는 바가 적지 않음에도 불구하고, ‘글쓰기 이론의도입’이라는 급진적인 수업방식으로 인해 적극적으로 적용되지 못했다. 이에 본 연구는WAW가 하나의 ‘접근법’이기 때문에 그 교육적 목표만 공유한다면 다양한 수업방식을 개발할 수 있다고 전제하고, WAW초기 수업 방식을 국내 대학 교육의 환경에 적합하게 수정하였다.<BR> 첫째, 읽기자료가 쓰기 지식의 전이에 도움이 되지 않는다는 문제를 해결하기 위해서, 읽기자료 유형을 ‘거시적 원리’, ‘분석 도구’, ‘절차적 지식’의 세 유형으로 세분화하였다. 둘째, 절차적 지식을 습득하는 활동이 부족하다는 문제를 보완하기 위해서 특정 담화공동체의 글쓰기를 연습하는 ‘실습 과제’를 추가하였다. 셋째, ‘학술적 저자성’의 발견을 위한 활동이 부재하다는 문제를 해결하기 위해 대학 입학 전 글쓰기 경험과 대학 입학 후 글쓰기 과정을 각각 성찰하고, 두 상황에서의 필자 정체성을 비교할 수 있는 활동을 구성하였다.

Exercise And Diet On Muscle Strength And Body Composition In College Freshmen Composition In College Freshmen

Exercise And Diet On Muscle Strength And Body Composition In College Freshmen Composition In College Freshmen

Monstrous Composition: Reanimating the Lecture in First-Year Writing Instruction

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

Making sense of resistance in an afterschool tutoring program

The term resistance has been an evolving concept in literacy and composition studies. While much has been studied in terms of student resistance in high schools, first-year composition classrooms, and in university writing centers, little is known about how resistance occurs in afterschool tutoring programs between volunteer writing tutors and their tutees. Using an ethnographic case study approach, this paper examines how three adult volunteer writing tutors made sense of resistance in working with their adolescent tutees in an urban tutoring program. The findings showed that tutor attitudes, values, and reactions shaped their experience of resistance in a variety of ways including a) misreading tutee signals of engagement; b) masking expectations of cultural and linguistic compliance within a discourse of resistance; and c) embracing resistance as a bridge to tutor growth. The author uses these findings to inform current conceptions of student resistance and compliance and to provide implication for volunteer tutor training.

Creating a Digital Writing Classroom: A Mixed Methods Study about a First-year Composition Tablet Initiative

Creating a Digital Writing Classroom: A Mixed Methods Study about a First-year Composition Tablet Initiative

Writing for Justice in First-Year Composition (FYC)

Conceptualized as writing for justice, I offer close-scrutiny and analyses of teaching artifacts that animate my course syllabi in order to understand how first-year composition (FYC) courses might function as a vehicle for advancing social justice. Specifically, this essay offers a framework for enabling students with the critical capacities to transfer social justice knowledge from the classroom to the street. With close readings of my curricula and borrowing from the scholarship on knowledge transfer studies (Bawarshi &amp; Reiff 2011; Beaufort 2007; Yancey 2011), I bridge the theoretical framework of writing for justice to a practice of writing for justice in curriculum design and development. As I argue here, this aspect of the curriculum provides the framework for crafting a FYC curriculum that aims to transform undergraduate students’ cognitive schemas by forming new “impressions” (Ahmed 2004) of social justice.

Using open educational resources to empower student creators

As students are asked to complete multimodal assignments in their higher education courses, librarians can guide students to the use of open educational resources (OER), as many librarians are already teaching students about copyright and how to respect intellectual property rights. Two instructional librarians designed a one-shot lesson for first-year composition students around the use of open resources, where the goal of instruction was for students to be empowered with their creative rights and to use the open resources available to them as creators.

Letter Writing as Activism

AbstractIn this article, the author describes the curriculum of a freshman composition class for socially marginalized students that uses an imaginative service‐learning component to nurture agency and voice.

Using a Transfer-Focused Writing Pedagogy to Improve Undergraduates’ Lab Report Writing in Gateway Engineering Laboratory Courses

Background: The lab report is a commonly assigned genre in engineering lab courses; however, students often have difficulties meeting the expectations of writing in engineering labs. At the same time, it is challenging for engineering faculty to instruct lab report writing because they are often under-supported in writing pedagogies and usually unfamiliar with the extent of students' prior writing knowledge. Literature review: Literature on technical communication in engineering addresses the importance of a rhetorical approach to writing instruction, as well as an emphasis on genre. Extending this literature, research into writing transfer provides valuable insight for better understanding how undergraduates negotiate the engineering lab report as a new genre within this distinct rhetorical context. Research questions: 1. How effective is a transfer-focused writing pedagogy in supporting students' understanding of the genre conventions of engineering lab reports? 2. How does the transfer-focused writing pedagogy impact students' writing quality in five categories (rhetorical knowledge, organization, evidence, critical thinking, and disciplinary conventions)? 3. What are the rhetorical features that engineering students improve or struggle with the most with lab report writing? Research methodology: Four engineering instructors and two English instructors participated in this study to design and develop the lab report writing instructional module, and implemented the module materials into their engineering lab courses. The module, consisting of lab report writing instruction and assessment resources, shares a rhetorical approach and foundational writing terms with first-year composition courses to emphasize a writing-transfer pedagogy. We collected and analyzed undergraduates' lab report samples to evaluate the impact of the module on students' writing performance. Two sets of lab reports were collected for analysis: the sample sets before (control), during the 2015-2016 academic year; and after (experimental) implementation of the module, during the 2016-2017 academic year. Results and conclusions: Data collected via pre- and post-implementation writing artifacts show that a rhetorical approach to teaching lab reports helped students better understand the expectations of the lab report as a discipline-specific genre, and it developed students' understanding of the rhetorical features of engineering writing. The pilot module positively impacted the quality of students' lab reports, a finding that suggests that using a transfer-focused writing pedagogy can successfully support the transfer and adaptation of writing knowledge into gateway or entry-level engineering laboratory courses.

Analyzing rater severity in a freshman composition course using many facet Rasch measurement

This study examined the rater severity of instructors using a multi-trait rubric in a freshman composition course offered in a private university in Kuwait. Use of standardized multi-trait rubrics is a recent development in this course and student feedback and anchor papers provided by instructors for each essay exam necessitated the assessment of rater effects, including severity/leniency and restriction of range in ratings among instructors. Data were collected from three instructors teaching the same course in Summer 2019, who rated the first midterm exam essays of their students and shared the scores with the researcher. Also, two students from each class were randomly selected and a total of six papers were marked by all instructors for anchoring purposes. Many-facet Rasch model (MFRM) was employed for data analysis. The results showed that although the raters used the rubric consistently during scoring across all examinees and tasks, they differed in their degree of leniency and severity, and tended to assign scores of 70 and 80 more frequently than the other scores. The study shows that composition instructors may differ in their rating behavior and this may cause dissatisfaction, creating a sense of unfairness among the students of severe instructors. The findings of this study are expected to help writing departments to monitor their inter-rater reliability and consistency in their ratings. The most practical way to achieve this is by organizing rater training workshops.

Re-Engaging Rhetorical Education through Procedural Feminism: Designing First-Year Writing Curricula That Listen

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms.