Group items tagged

discussing the focus, content, timing, and purpose of staff meetings

discussing how to best meet the needs of international students

discussing the challenges posed by Quality Enhancement Plans, and how to meet them

"College readiness has several dimensions, but of particular import is readiness to produce scholarly work that meets the expectations of college instructors. Differences from high school and college are well documented in the literature, and this study adds to that body of work by delineating the characteristics of first-year college assignments through a qualitative analysis of college faculty assignment instructions. Three themes emerge from the analysis: information literacy, especially initiating inquiry; academic writing, especially citing evidence in support of a thesis; learner dispositions, especially curiosity, open-mindedness, self-reliance, and perseverance. Findings have implications for high school library programs and high school teachers as well as librarians working with first-year college students."

"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

a discussion of how a writing center with limited resources might meet increased demand following a successful marketing campaign

A collection of promotional and educational videos. Includes all of the PeerCentered Meet the Author chats

PeerCentered is a space for peer writing tutors/consultants or anyone interested in collaborative learning in writing centers to blog with their colleagues from around the world. Bloggers here will share their ideas, experiences, or insight. Related conversation on WCenter (links to archived "Meet the Author" sessions): http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/messages?id=19608359

PeerCentered is a space for peer writing tutors/consultants or anyone interested in collaborative learning in writing centers to blog with their colleagues from around the world. Bloggers here will share their ideas, experiences, or insight. Has a search engine to search for topics discussed in blog entries.