Using a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) model of education, an English composition instructor designed an honors section of first-year composition to evaluate current best practices in the field of teaching writing to STEM undergraduates. The students, all first-year engineering majors, conducted guided research on best…

Indiana University of Pennsylvania's (IUP) course catalogue describes English 101: Composition I as a first-year writing course in which students use a variety of resources--including but not limited to memory, observation, critical reading and viewing, analysis, and reflection--and a focus on writing process to create projects in a variety of…

This essay considers the long-standing challenges, in both practice and theory, to collaborative writing in the first-year classroom. I argue that Hannah Arendt's concepts of plurality and natality are useful frameworks for thinking constructively and practically about teaching argumentative writing through collaboration. I explore these…

This paper focuses on a pedagogical and instructional approach to engaging students in the classroom with the specific activity of a writing prompt, which utilizes a short video about current events and trends coupled with writing and discussion. This strategy allows active student learning in which the students engage, develop critical thinking…

English 1311: Expository English Composition is the first semester course in a two-semester first-year composition (FYC) sequence. Both ENG 1311 and its second-semester counterpart, ENG 1312, are required for all students unless they have transfer credit covering this requirement or place out of one or both of the courses via the College-Level…

It is the scope of this article to present a theoretical framework for successful collaboration and our ideas on how it might be implemented in a first-year college composition classroom. We began by creating a collaborative assignment for our composition classes based on a very cursory understanding of successful collaboration. In light of this…

Offers a narrative of the collaborative creation of a HyperCard hypertext called the E.A.R., and describes how the ideas developed in that project were adapted into a first-year composition course. Hopes to gain insight into both the larger aims of the border crossings central to bell hooks' ongoing project and the more local goals of hypertext…

Each year that the author of this paper, an English instructor at Moorhead College (Minnesota), teaches the first-year "research paper," one instructor turns more and more to collaborative writing work. And she admits that some of her motives in reshaping the research paper in collaborative ways can seem to be based in assisting herself…

Collaborative writing is a "messy" process which reveals much about the ways students struggle to write alone as well as with others. Two sections of an undergraduate college writing class were assigned a collaborative essay, to be written in small groups. In many groups, students could not negotiate or communicate with each other. The process…

It does not take a computer expert to teach students how to use word processing software to prewrite, write, revise, and edit a professional-looking paper. Just a small amount of expertise allows students to work independently as long as they have access to a computer and the necessary software. The computer also facilitates interactive learning…

Describes the five major problems faced by foreign students in traditional composition classes. Presents types of tutorial activities which may prove beneficial when dealing with the major problems that ESL students have in both reading and writing in English. Discusses the effect of such tutorial activities at the University of Kentucky. (HB)

A study investigated the effectiveness of full dyadic writing as a technique for teaching writing to students of English as a Second Language (ESL). Subjects were 31 college students of diverse cultural backgrounds enrolled in ESL sections of freshman English. Each chose a partner with a different native language with whom to write two essays, the…