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This is from the library's scholarly database, you will need to login to view it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article examines the reasons university students have anxiety over writing and/or confidence in their writing. I was especially interested because of the focus on genders. The authors hypothesize that female students are more likely to experience anxiety in their writing because of a difficulty in navigating the power structures that are academic discourse, and that male students are more confident in their writing than females even when there is no difference in ability. The article conducts a study of 127 college students at a public university near the Texas-Mexico border.

The article I found articulates the beneficial attributes of tutoring, mentoring, and faculty assistance in the "alleviation of writing anxiety." There is also discussion on embellishing the self-efficiency university students when writing essays.There authors also use gender as a precursor in determining the differences between the efficacy of writing among males and females. In addition to analytical gender studies, the authors also integrate other academic variables such as GPA's and literary composition as a "recreational activity." There is even breathing exercises, methods for relaxation, and interventional aid to students who completely reprehend writing all together. This is article is definitely pertinent to the academically overstressed life of university students; especially, students enrolled in an English course. At a certain point, we all experience unpalatable junctures of unwanted anxiety, that by any means, impedes our ability to academically perform. It is very similar to the dynamics of examination anxiety. A student may have acknowledgments that exceed the finite boundaries of an exam, but cannot access their superior level of comprehension because of their cognitively, suppressive test anxiety. The word "test," "examination," or "dissertation" have become connotatively dreadful; however, replacing these words with academic euphemisms such as "long quiz" or "filling paper words project" could potentially reduce oppressive, academic anxiety-in a sense. Judging by all of the diagrams of everyone's writing process, I'd say the extraneous variety of distractions can all result from, or even cause, anxiety.

This article discusses a program used by Kent State University to help high school students transition to college through an initiative that introduces the students to collegiate level academic libraries while they are still in high school. This program was started in an attempt to help college freshman succeed and to increase the retention rate at the university. In the program, high school seniors take field trips to the Kent State Library and are introduced to higher levels of research and the workings of a collegiate library. There are also online resources that are available to those outside of the immediate Kent State University area. The initial results of this program have been very positive and students have been succeeding at a higher rate. The librarians believe that college freshmen can be overwhelmed with everything a college library has to offer them and may be hesitant to ask questions, so they simply give up instead. But if they are introduced to the system when they are still in high school and excited about everything college has to offer, they are more likely to succeed when they finally reach the college level.

I read chapter 3, "The Bourgeois Subject and The Demise of Rhetorical Education" from the book "Composition in the University" by Sharon Crowley. In this essay Sharon Crowley makes a specific assertion on the status of the practice in teaching rhetoric in universities, namely, relating to the development of the bourgeois subject. The essay begins with a general discussion of the relevance of historical development to the point of contemporary rhetorical education. Differentiating from the practice of education of rhetoric in the ancient tradition, which focuses more on oral and discursive skills to be in a given bound discourse, contemporary rhetorical education focuses more on literary views, which is governed, and reflective of, the overall picture of the bourgeois subjectivity.

Andrea R. Olinger from the Department of Applied Linguistics at University of California, Los Angeles demonstrates "how interaction constructs discoursal identities" (273) in her article, "Constructing identities through: 'discourse': Stance and interaction in collaborative college writing." Olinger brings up an important point in this article, "that students often feel a mixture of desire for an resistance to the identities they must take on" (274). The examination of college students' writing demonstrated how these identities are "contested, desired, and resisted" (274). By now English 431 students should have seen some form of writing from their English 30 students. Thus, now we can ask ourselves as well as the English 30 students in what ways do the writer's discoursal identity resist or conform to the expectations of a college writing course? 

This article is about a study that was conducted in Texas that was trying to determine the relationship between students' agreement/disagreement with a "university-wide writing competency graduation requirement" and the scores students got on the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test. The article discusses how important writing is in college and explaines that "writing ability is used to communicate thoughts, including what is learned and is a critical element of a college education." The study was conducted to see how important college students believed writing to be; to see if writing is as important to the students as it is to the educators. Educators see writing as a way to gage how knowledgable a student is on a certain topic. Writing competently and critically is seen as a necessary skill to have as it is the way students are able to prove they know and understand what they are being taught. The results of the study weren't all that surprising; students with high THEA scores agreed with the writing graduation requirement and students with low THEA scores disagreed with the requirement and expressed a desire for less college writing. These results aren't surprising and the article notes that the study wasn't aimed to be "an indepth formative or summative self-evaluation of undergraduates ' writing experiences" but was more about getting information and feedback from the students. The study pais close attention to the students' attitudes towards the writing requirement and graduation requirement and challenges college students faced with their writing and then looked at strategies to combat these challenges. The article could be interesting to get information on how students think about college writing, the challenges they face and the difficulties they have.

This article by John Bitchener, Stuart Young, and Denise Cameron of the Auckland University of Technology explores the value of grammar-related feedback in ESL writing. They found a combination of explicit written and oral feedback to be the most effective method to enact change. However, the change in grammar accuracy did't always last. The authors suggest prolonged exposure to this kind of feedback would show a more consistent result. 

This is an interesting review/exploration by Jill Parrot of Eastern Kentucky University of David Foster's book "Writing with Authority". Parrot explains that Foster's book compares and contrasts the German university writing systems with American ones to examine the effects of each on a college student's confidence and self-efficacy in writing. Foster's thesis begins, "Undergraduates should learn how to write as knowledge-makers, developing the capacities for self-direction, long-term goal setting, and cumulative, recursive task development and writing," thus setting up the focus of the study. He argues that while there are pros and cons to each country's academic practices, the German system's focus on gradual development and self-direction with frequent interaction and discussion in the early stages helps to create a more long-term oriented view of the writing process and to establish the students as authorities on a topic that they may spend a great deal of time with. Without having access to the book itself, this article serves as a very thorough analysis of the text and I found this to be very informative.

For the past few weeks in this class I have generated all of my focus on the identity of the students in Enlish 30 workshops. After reading the article, "Exploring teacher-writer identities in the classroom: Conceptualising the struggle" I a new question has stemmed: how do teacher's identity as writers affect students' progress in academic progress? Authors, Teresa Cremin and Sally Baker from the Department of Education of The Open University suggest "that teachers' development as writers has the potential to enrich writing pedagogy and impact positively on young writers." The idea of teachers writing alongside their students is in my opinion highly valuable because students and teachers have the opportunity to experience the writing process together. In previous articles I have read that relatability between students and instructor are essential to the learning environment. If instructors are constantly writing alongside their students trying to establish/re-establish their identity in academic writing, students can learn easily learn how to do the same through "shared challenges" (9). While English 431 students cannot use this strategy because members of their English 30 workshops come from different sections of English 130 we can attempt to produce similar assignments alongside our students. For example, inquiry assignments are a common goal in most English 130 classes. Similarly, English 431 students must write an inquiry essay. English 431 students could incorporate their progress into the workshop by showing the English 30 students what they have done so far, why they are asking certain questions, how they did something, etc.

Digital Discourse: Composing with media in the writing classroom Karen Gocsik This article, posted under the writing and rhetoric section of the Dartmouth University website, discusses the potential multi-media assignments and teaching methods can have on new-age students. Gocsik feels that the literacy of the screen should become a third type of literacy behind oral and print. The nuances in composing a webpage or video reveal similar elements to that of constructing an essay. Gocsik makes the point that making a video project teaches students how to: come up with explicit vs. implied theses, structure according to the expectations of the audience and conventions of a particular medium or genre, and how to craft arguments out of a polophony of voices while creating a multimedia voice of one's own (Gocsik). Multimedia devices such as blogs or webpage's can be used to assist in the bigger project of a video collaboration.

Exploring the Role of Reformulations and a Model Text in EFL Students' Writing Performance Yang, Luxin ; Zhang, Ling The article by Yang and Zhang shares the results from a study of a three-staged writing task by ESL students in a Beijing university. The three stages are composing, comparison (of the reformulation), and revising. The students were asked to study and compose, in English, a narrative of a short picture prompt. The short narratives were then reformulated by a native English speaker, but still maintained the student's original meaning. The students then compared the two to "notice" the differences. The article clearly explains the many types of differences between the two texts; mainly language-related episodes (LRE) and content-related episodes (CRE). The students were also asked to compare their narratives with a model narrative. Though the students tended to focus more on the lexical issues, they were able to more clearly relate their current stage of English language learning with that of a native English speaker. This helped them to "notice the gap". I would recommend this to anyone focusing their attention on ESL learners.

Aimee C. Mapes writes about her experience as a teacher in Freshman Connection of FC, on the social and cultural context among at-risk, first-year university students. Issues of identity are central to understanding the discourse because the context instances identity. I found parallels in the experiences of Keneika and my own experiences as a minority, although she was a girl. The study examined the role of gender as the site of pedagogic content. Academically underprepared students in the federal TRIO program include first generation, having low income, racial minority status, or learning disabled. The author/instructor also felt a commonality with the student she observed. One thing that emerged from the FC progam was that conflict emerged and it was related to identity. The most interesting thing to me was the fact that because of the focus on "at-risk" groups, much of the attention was devoted to males. This dynamic was a response to the male voice that dominated discussions and seemed to be heard whenever there were behavoiral problems--males were associated with problems and males were overrepresented as a result. The programmatic behavoir necessarily overlooked the status or identity of females in the FC. Because the females were not vocal, their nonparticipation, as a function of gender, diminished focus on them. Keneika responded to her position through the assignments. She thought of herself in very positive terms and absolutely different from the males whom she considered inferior. Everything that represented male to her, she constructed the opposite trait or quality for herself. Assignments offer students a way to polarize against social positioning.

Interesting! Aimee Mapes did her MA here at Chico State. Will have to read the article!

This article talks about whether or not you should study while listening to music and the types of music that can be beneficial when listening to studying. I'm still looking for information more specific to different types of studying and listening to music, like listening to music in a workshop setting or a lecture/classroom setting.

OK, did it mention writing, though? Find some research more directly related . . .