The early success of the revised ESL literacy development curriculum for international undergraduates at a large Midwestern university suggests that a curriculum which integrates reading and writing activity around meaning-making tasks with texts and focuses on fluency before accuracy is preferable to a skill-based curriculum. Support for this…

Adult students are more anxious about writing for school, less familiar with academic conventions, and more likely to drop out than younger students. For students learning to move between personal, work, and academic discourse communities, the ongoing and explicit writing instruction argued for in the research of Sternglass, Herrington and Curtis,…

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…

Through the regular use of what Donald Schon has termed reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, students can learn to improve their "reflection-in-presentation," in Kathleen Blake Yancey's term. Students are often asked to do this type of reflection-in-presentation as a capstone to first-year or basic writing courses. However, a number of…

I frame the continuing value of basic writing as part of a long tradition in composition studies challenging dominant beliefs about literacy and language abilities, and I link basic writing to emerging--e.g."translingual"--approaches to language. I identify basic writing as vital to the field of composition in its rejection of simplistic notions…

In basic writing classrooms and scholarship, reading too often remains invisible; neither research nor established practice provides tangible activities to support reading and connect it to writing. This article documents a search for structured, scaffolded, low-stakes reading activities, a search that moves off the college campus and into the…