Group items tagged

"The Writing Instructor is a peer-reviewed journal publishing in print since 1981 and on the Internet since June, 2001. Its distinguished editorial board consists of over 150 scholars- teachers- writers representing over 75 universities, community colleges, and K-12 schools. For more information about acceptance rates, the anonymous peer-review process, guidelines for review committees, and the editorial board, please read our Editorial FAQs or contact us."

From Praxis: "Writing centers are feeling the effects of budget reductions across higher education nationwide. Like other student services that don't offer credits or produce revenue, writing centers are particularly vulnerable to budget cuts. Community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities across the country are asking writing centers to make hard choices- choices that will affect consultant hiring, pay, and benefits as well as hours of operation, services, technological resources, and administration."

Basic Writing e-Journal (BWe) is a peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal. BWe publishes scholarship on teaching and learning in various basic writing contexts. Since basic writing programs often enroll economically disadvantaged students from diverse backgrounds, these students, their teachers, and the policies that influence their access to higher education are often the focus of this journal. Other key topics of concern to BWe readers include curriculum, instructional practice, teacher preparation, program evaluation, and student learning. Additionally, reviews of current scholarly books and textbooks appear regularly in BWe. Currently based at the City College of New York, BWe was founded in 1999 by the Council on Basic Writing (CBW) and continues to be sponsored by CBW.

"Introduction to Shouse, Claude F. "The Writing Laboratory in Colleges and Universities." Diss. University of Southern California, 1953." Full dissertation available as PDF

"Post-secondary writing centers have struggled to produce substantial, credible, and sustainable evidence of their impact in the educational environment. The objective of this study was to develop a college-level writing self-efficacy scale that can be used across repeated sessions in a writing center, as self-efficacy has been identified as an important construct underlying successful writing and cognitive development. A 20-item instrument (PSWSES) was developed to evaluate writerly self-efficacy. 505 university students participated in the study. Results indicate that the PSWSES has high internal consistency and reliability across items and construct validity, which was supported through a correlation between tutor perceptions of client writerly self-efficacy and client self-ratings. Factor analysis revealed three factors: local and global writing process knowledge, physical reaction, and time/effort. Additionally, across repeated sessions, the clients' PSWSES scores appropriately showed an increase in overall writerly self-efficacy. Ultimately, this study offers a new paradigm for conceptualizing the daily work in which writing centers engage, and the PSWSES offers writing centers a meaningful quantitative program assessment avenue by (1) redirecting focus from actual competence indicators to perceived competence development and (2) allowing for replication, causality, and sustainability for program improvement. "

conference announcements; "Building a Comprehensive English Learning Center at Del Mar College" (discusses materials, function, teacher education, advertising/promotion); "Where Does the Writing Center Fit In?" (WCs supporting WAC); mailing list

"Birthing a Writing Lab" (advice for new directors starting brand new labs); "The Writing Laboratory at William Carey College: A Tutorial Approach"; mailing list

video of  Ozark Technical College tutors doing a sort of flash mob dance. 

This open-access book is a collection of twenty-two articles provides practical information on establishing a writing center and monitoring its daily operation. Born of the practical experiences and theoretical insights of editor Pam (Farrell) Childers, it addresses "problems and frustrations, shares successes and failures, and offers suggestions. In general, it addresses the issue of establishing and maintaining a successful high school writing lab/center. It also provides college and university writing lab/center directors with insight into what the high schools are doing." The Table of Contents is listed on this page, and the whole book is free to download through the WAC Clearninghouse link provided here.

"As student populations in colleges and universities continue to diversify, composition programs do not always meet students' varying needs. English as a Second Language (ESL) students appear to fail mainstream writing courses at higher rates than their traditional counterparts, yet mainstreaming continues to be mandated, often due to budgetary constraints. Many programs offer multicultural writing courses, but these, too, are often ineffective for many students. Meanwhile, as Paul Kei Matsuda shows, there is a decided split between the disciplines of composition and ESL. Since ESL scholars have a much stronger history of working with diverse student populations than composition scholars do, this study aims to look to ESL scholarship, specifically to contrastive rhetoric, to explore more effective methods of teaching writing to students with varying needs. This case study takes an in-depth look at one student's journey writing across cultures. Ming, a Chinese immigrant who has been in the United States for approximately ten years, is a junior at the University of Rhode Island who struggles with writing. Over the course of one semester, three of her projects were studied in depth. Data include transcripts of audiotaped tutorial sessions in the URI Writing Center, Ming's assignments and papers, and the researcher's notes from interviews with Ming following the tutorial sessions. ^ The new contrastive rhetoric (Connor, Kaplan, Purves) insists that external factors such as culture, education, and media influence the rhetorical patterns writers use. Through a lens of contrastive rhetoric, it becomes clear that most of Ming's difficulties when writing stem from a lack of familiarity with the conventions of U.S. academic discourse or of what her reader expects from her text. The source of much of this is cultural. While Ming's experiences are not generalizable, an in-depth look at her experiences foregrounds some of the issues that contrastive rhetoric addresses, making th

Links to all of the WAC Bibliographies on the following topics: Writing in the Disciplines Writing to Learn Program Design Faculty Concerns WAC in Two-Year Colleges WAC in the Schools WAC in the Disciplines WAC Assessment Pedagogy Writing Processes Writing Conventions Genre Research WAC and Writing Centers/Learning Centers Writing Fellows Programs WAC and Second-Language Writing Service and Experiential Learning Literacy Community Inquiry Technology Discourse Analysis Graduate Students

"More and more ESL students are seeking writing help at U.S. college and university writing centers. This trend emphasizes the complementary role of the writing center and ESL writing instruction in improving ESL writing skills. Writing center and ESL writing pedagogy share the process and collaborative approaches, which emphasize the writing process using revision and reader feedback. Often difficult to implement in a classroom setting, these approaches can be used successfully with ESL students in the writing center. However, many writing center instructors, unfamiliar with the needs of ESL students, are often ill-equipped to work successfully with this special population. This has caused writing center faculties to turn to the ESL profession for help in establishing suitable strategies. The growing need for ESL expertise in the writing center has created a variety of capacities to which ESL instructors can contribute."

An overview of one learning commons, at Lyndon State College, and how the writing center fits in

This video, produced by Mountwest Community and Technical College, demonstrates a typical tutoring session, including the greeting, the assessment of the student's needs, the creation of an agenda, the evaluation of the writing, the confirmation of the student's ideas, and the creation of a plan of action.

Produced by Vassar College, this video emphasizes a common writing problem: repetition, and encourages students who struggle with repetition to visit the university's Writing Center.

the first "Great Moments in Writing Lab History"; a report on "Comp-Lab Project" of York College, "where reduced classroom hours are systematically coordinated with a flexible schedule of autotutorial work in a writing laboratory"; a report from a WC on offering student support beyond auto-instruction; a report on computer-assisted instruction; mailing list

"A Free Guide to Writing Your Personal Statement" includes help with brainstorming and structure, in addition to how to write a personal statement as a narrative