Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2008

This analysis of the Assessment Practices section of the national TYCA survey of writing programs examines recent trends in placement and exit practices at the two-year college.

Even with careful, thoughtful planning and attention to the scholarship in disability studies, any course that centers on literature featuring illness and disability inevitably interrogates the philosophical positions and social values of the disabled community, as well as those of the able-bodied, necessitating a classroom that is sensitive to discomfort encountered when participants’ deeply held beliefs come into conflict with their own desires to be seen as politically correct.

This article describes an approach to discussing and writing about literature using common student experience, with tattoos as a point of entry.

C. D. Albin is professor of English at Missouri State University–West Plains and has contributed poems to several journals, including Big Muddy, Cape Rock, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College.

The writing assignment described offers an introduction to the college research paper genre.

The article argues for the creative use of archives in the classroom as a way of building a community of learners.

Rhetorically challenging literature can be made to serve the purposes of first-year composition in new ways. Excerpts from the novels of Marcel Proust that focus on the author’s characteristic scrutinizing, reflexive attention to style work successfully as models for assisting writers in acquiring the habits of reading and re-reading, and of writing, revisiting, and revising, which are essential to well-written prose.

The responsibility of a writing teacher is, finally, to teach his or her students to pay attention—to their own lives and to the world in which they live.

“When Readers Disagree”, Kip Strasma, Review Editor; “Teaching Writing with Latino/a Students: Lessons Learned at Hispanic-Serving Institutions” by Cristina Kirklighter, Diana Cardenas, and Susan Wolff Murphy, Reviewed by Kip Strasma; “Engaging Grammar: Practical Advice for Real Classrooms” by Amy Benjamin with Tom Oliva, Reviewed by Kimme Nuckles; “Educating English Language Learners: A Synthesis of Research Evidence” by Fred Genesee, Kathryn Lindholm-Leary, William M. Saunders, and Donna Christian, Reviewed by Mercè Pujol.