Group items tagged

This links to an index to Freshman English News journal, with a bibliography of articles in all those issues. Useful resource!

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

a discussion of how to best approach training veteran tutors when one is a new director (changing policies, new training, etc.)

discussion on many issues related to starting a new writing center

The (New) Legal Writer: A Collection of Resources for Lawyers and other writers. Includes general advice for good writing.

A listing of Writing Centers in New Zealand.

A listing of Writing Centers in New York.

A listing of Writing Centers in New Hampshire.

A listing of Writing Centers in New Jersey.

A listing of Writing Centers in New Mexico.

A listing of high school writing centers in New York.

This site is designed to help new attendees at the Computers and Writing Conference feel welcome. You will find materials for first-time attendees and for mentors. It has Facebook groups and pages, plus mail  discussion lists.

Publication Information: Harris, Muriel. (2015). Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference. WAC Clearinghouse Landmark Publications in Writing Studies: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/harris/. Originally Published in Print, 1986, by National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, Illinois. This groundbreaking book offers advice for teachers new to conferencing, experienced teachers seeking to refine or expand their approaches to conferencing, and tutors working in writing centers. Since it was published in 1986, it has become one of the most widely cited books on conferencing. Harris offers a theoretical framework for conference teaching, descriptions of activities typical of and central to writing conferences, advice on diagnostic strategies for individualized instruction, and instructional strategies. Discussions in the book borrow from a wide range of fields, including counseling and therapy, cognitive science, anthropology, and education. In appendices, she includes a set of teaching materials that can be useful in tutor and teacher training.

From Praxis: "Welcome to Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. We are a new publication devoted to the interests of writing consultants: labor issues, writing center news, training, consultant initiatives, and scholarship. Because this is a publication whose first issue's theme is "Who We Are," introductions are in order."

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.

"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. "

"Unnecessary Hangups" (in praise of using machine-based self-instruction or guided self-study tools when budgets don't allow for large tutoring staffs); report from a new WC; "Three Sources for Writing Lab Tutors" (on using funding from Veteran Affairs to provide services for veterans on the G.I. Bill); "Usage Study at BYU" (on identifying effective instructional materials); mailing list

This video promotes the Writing Center at the University of New Hampshire by describing its purpose and resources, the function of its assistants, and the process of making an appointment.

The Journal of Response to Writing publishes papers based on research, theory, and/or practice that meaningfully contribute to an understanding of how response practices lead to better writing. JRW has three purposes: 1. Provide a venue for theorizing and reporting ground-breaking research on response to writing 2. Invite writing theorists, researchers, and practitioners to a venue to share their work with one another and colleagues in adjacent fields, most notably Composition, Applied Linguistics, and Foreign Language teaching viz a viz L1 and L2 writing 3. Provide new or inexperienced teachers with immediate suggestions for use in giving, encouraging, or managing responses to their students' writing

"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