This book presents 93 essays that offer guidance, reassurance, and commentary on the many activities leading up to and surrounding classroom instruction in first-year composition. Essays in the book are written by instructors who teach in community colleges, liberal arts colleges, state university systems, and research institutions. The 14 section titles and 2 representative essays from each section are: Section 1, Contexts for Teaching Writing, "The Departmental Perspective" (Roger Gilles) and "Composition, Community, and Curriculum: A Letter to New Composition Teachers" (Geoffrey Chase); Section 2, Seeing the Forest and the Trees of Curriculum, "Teaching in an Idealized Outcomes-Based First-Year Writing Program" (Irvin Peckham) and "Constructing Bridges between High School and College Writing" (Marguerite Helmers); Section 3, Constructing Syllabus Materials, "On Syllabi" (Victor Villanueva) and "Departmental Syllabus: Experience in Writing" (Gregory Clark); Section 4, Constructing Effective Writing Assignments, "Sequencing Writing Projects in Any Composition Class" (Penn State University Composition Program Handbook) and "Autobiography: The Rhetorical Efficacy of Self-Reflection/Articulation" (Bonnie Lenore Kyburz); Section 5, Guiding Students to Construct Reflective Portfolios, "A Writing Portfolio Assignment" (Phyllis Mentzell Ryder) and "Portfolio Requirements for Writing and Discourse" (C. Beth Burch); Section 6, Strategies for Course Management, "Fostering Classroom Civility" (Lynn Langer Meeks, Joyce Kinkead, Keith VanBezooyen, and Erin Edwards) and"Course Management Guidelines" (Rebecca Moore Howard); Section 7, Teaching Invention, "Teaching Invention" (Sharon Crowley) and "Invention Activity" (Theresa Enos); Section 8, Orchestrating Peer-Response Activities, "Approaches to Productive Peer Review" (Fiona Paton) and "Reflection on Peer-Review Practices" (Lisa Cahill); Section 9, Responding to In-Process Work to Promote Revision, "Less Is More in Response to Student Writing" (Clyde Moneyhun) and "One Dimension of Response to Student Writing: How Students Construct Their Critics" (Carol Rutz); Section 10, Responding to and Evaluating Polished Writing, "Developing Rubrics for Instruction and Evaluation" (Chris M. Anson and Deanna P. Dannels) and "What Makes Writing 'Good'?/What Makes a 'Good' Writer?" (Ruth Overman Fischer); Section 11, Teaching Writing with Technology, "Overcoming the Unknown" (Adelheid Thieme) and "Asynchronous Online Teaching" (Donald Wolff); Section 12, Constructing a Teaching Portfolio, "Teaching-Portfolio Potential and Concerns: A Brief Review" (Camille Newton) and "Thinking about Your Teaching Portfolio" (C. Beth Burch); Section 13, Teaching Matters of Grammar, Usage, and Style, "A Cautionary Introduction" (Keith Rhodes) and "And the Question Is This--'What Lessons Can We, as Writers, Take from This Reading for Our Own Writing?'" (Elizabeth Hodges); and Section 14, Teaching Research Skills, "First-Year Composition as an Introduction to Academic Discourse" (M. J. Braun and Sarah Prineas) and "Teaching Research Skills in the First-Year Composition Class" (Mark Gellis). (Most papers contain references.) (RS)

"This volume is an inquiry into community college first-year pedagogy and policy at a time when change has not only been called for but also mandated by state lawmakers who financially control public education. It also acknowledges new policies that are eliminating developmental and remedial writing courses while keeping mind that, for most community college students, first-year composition serves as the last course they will take in the English department toward their associate's degree. This volume also serves as a call to action to change the way community colleges attend to faculty concerns. Only by listening to teachers can the concerns discussed in the volume be addressed; it is the teachers who see how societal changes intersect with campus policies and students' lives on a daily basis."--Adapted from back cover

Composition directors often have little time to prepare new instructors in methods of teaching writing and to forewarn them of the many daily problems that arise in this challenging work. Teaching College Composition, which can be read in a weekend, goes a long way toward meeting those ends. It provides information on twenty-six topics, from issues of class conduct to methods of critiquing papers to ways of evaluating student work. It also provides approaches to six of the most common writing assignments in first-year composition. Teaching College Composition can also serve as a supplemental text for a teaching of writing course, providing an element of "street knowledge" to the theoretical content.

Statistical and anecdotal evidence documents that even states with relatively little ethnic or cultural diversity are beginning to notice and ask questions about long-term resident immigrants in their classes. As shifts in student population become more widespread, there is an even greater need for second language specialists, composition specialists, program administrators, and developers in colleges and universities to understand and adapt to the needs of the changing student audience(s). This book is designed as an introduction to the topic of diverse second language student audiences in U.S. post-secondary education. It is appropriate for those interested in working with students in academic settings, especially those students who are transitioning from secondary to post-secondary education. It provides a coherent synthesis and summary not only of the scope and nature of the changes but of their practical implications for program administration, course design, and classroom instruction, particularly for writing courses. For pre-service teachers and those new(er) to the field of working with L2 student writers, it offers an accessible and focused look at the “audience” issues with many practical suggestions. For teacher-educators and administrators, it offers a resource that can inform their own decision-making.

English Composition Teacher's Guidebook: How to Survive (and Even Thrive) as a Part-time or Adjunct Instructor is a practical and motivational handbook for the multitudes of itinerant English adjunct and part-time instructors who travel between multiple colleges and universities teaching English composition to students from different cultures and age groups. The book offers advice and recommendations that are geared specifically for this audience together with sufficient ready-to-use teaching material for a semester-long first-year composition course. The author uses imagined collegial conversations over coffee and hiking and coaching themes to draw lessons for teachers, beginning each chapter with a vignette based on his experiences hiking in scenic locations. The book contains materials for students that can be projected or copied as handouts, including work on sentence combining and analysis as well as topics, peer response sheets, and assessment rubrics for essay assignments. Both the hiking vignettes and classroom activities are illustrated by photographs which add to the interest and enjoyment of reading this book.

Composition in the University examines the required introductory course in composition within American colleges and universities. According to Sharon Crowley, the required composition course has never been conceived in the way that other introductory courses have been—as an introduction to the principles and practices of a field of study. Rather it has been constructed throughout much of its history as a site from which larger educational and ideological agendas could be advanced, and such agendas have not always served the interests of students or teachers, even though they are usually touted as programs of study that students "need." If there is a master narrative of the history of composition, it is told in the institutional attitude that has governed administration, design, and staffing of the course from its beginnings—the attitude that the universal requirement is in place in order to construct docile academic subjects. Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing. She examines historical attempts to reconfigure the required course in nonhumanist terms, such as the advent of communications studies during the 1940s. Crowley devotes two essays to this phenomenon, concentrating on the furor caused by the adoption of a communications program at the University of Iowa. Composition in the University concludes with a pair of essays that argue against maintenance of the universal requirement. In the last of these, Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place. Crowley presents her findings in a series of essays because she feels the history of the required composition course cannot easily be understood as a coherent narrative since understandings of the purpose of the required course have altered rapidly from decade to decade, sometimes in shockingly sudden and erratic fashion. The essays in this book are informed by Crowley's long career of teaching composition, administering a composition program, and training teachers of the required introductory course. The book also draw on experience she gained while working with committees formed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication toward implementation of the Wyoming Resolution, an attempt to better the working conditions of post-secondary teachers of writing.