In the hopes of deepening Basic Writing instructors' critical awareness of their authority in assigning meaning to student experience, we present a case study of two adult-arrival immigrant students. We explore the ways that writing instructors and tutors encourage students' personal narratives of persistence--rather than actual persistence…

Since the 1970s, legacy Basic Writing systems have survived despite growing resistance grounded in an increasing awareness of their troubling roots and harmful effects. In this article, two 2017 basic writing students and their teacher conduct a mixed-method "postmortem" examination of the now eliminated zero-credit course and writing…

Resurgence in college-level reading research has led to studies on rhetorical reading and reading transfer, but often absent from these discussions are student emotions about reading and themselves as readers. Our qualitative study explores these emotions by examining how basic writing students perceive ideal readers and reading difficulties. Our…

Native Americans are largely absent from the basic writing literature, yet their experiences and identity construction as emerging academic writers offer important insights for college writing instructors. This study addresses previous research on Native American college writers, the legacy of education and writing in Native communities, and the…

Scholars such as Diane Kelly-Riley and Patricia Bizzell have argued that the student writing feature most likely to place a student into a basic writing course is the presence of dialect other than standard academic English. This essay examines how assessment practices can foster students' diverse languages rather than inhibit them. I conducted a…

The question of who is the basic writer threads the history of Basic Writing, characterizing many disciplinary tensions and concerns. When traced to Basic Writing's beginnings as part of open admissions at CUNY, the question often links to Shaughnessy's "Errors and Expectations" as a telling of basic writers' language deficiencies. This…

This article explores the pedagogical implications of translingualism by offering writing theory cartoon as a pedagogical tool to support basic writers' development of translingual dispositions. In a curriculum that challenges the supremacy of standard English over other languages and modalities, this assignment supports basic, multilingual…

Students in rural communities often describe themselves as unsuccessful readers and writers in a university context, yet off-campus their literacy lives may be avidly experienced and richly valued. This article investigates the layered literacies of student clients and writing center consultants on a rural, regional campus in an Appalachian county…

This essay describes the process of reassessing our BW program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in order to cultivate a more deliberate, transparent negotiation among stakeholders toward a "transcultural ethos." Informed by Bruce Horner's argument that leading-edge work on language and language difference can take place in BW, we…

In 2012, the State of Connecticut enacted Public Act 12-40, legislation that dramatically changed the way remedial education was theorized, designed, and delivered at community colleges and regional state universities in Connecticut. One of the most controversial features of this legislative movement was that it appeared to establish a…

This article presents the results of three comparative analyses on forty-seven student papers in order to examine the effectiveness of a basic writing course in developing students' academic writer identity. The course curriculum, grounded in social identity theory, focuses on the core writing concepts and dispositions that promote writer…

This article offers a revised version of transactional reading theory to explain how students classified as basic writers tend to employ counterproductive reading and thinking processes that inhibit them from full participation in academic life. Louise Rosenblatt proposes that readers have two main positions or purposes in reading--the efferent…

Dominant perspectives of basic writers' self-sponsored literacies tend to overlook the important roles such activities can play in literate development. Drawn from texts, interviews, and participant-observations collected during a five-year study, this article continues the examination of the relationship between one writer's curricular and…

This essay looks to Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) for strategies that can be implemented in order to combat contemporary neoliberal attacks against the programmatic and institutional spaces of basic writing within Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). Working from Nedra Reynolds' notion of thirdspace-oriented "dwelling"…

In this article, I revisit the Elbow/Bartholomae debate, review recent scholarship on academic writing, and discuss the ways that the mandates of traditional academic writing can further disenfranchise already marginalized students. I suggest that, due to the double consciousness with which these students often live, they come into classrooms…