Basic Writers: Who We Teach

41. Adler-Kassner, Linda. "Just Writing, Basically: Basic Writers on Basic Writing." Journal of Basic Writing 18.2 (1999): 69-90.

    At the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Adler-Kassner and her colleague Randy Woodland interviewed sixteen randomly chosen students about basic writers and basic writing. Adler-Kassner identifies three issues that emerged from the students' responses. First, employing coursework designed to erase the stigma of being labeled a basic writer is a difficult endeavor because most students do not fully understand what that label means. In addition, students in the study tended to equate writing and reading with English courses only and found their composition coursework to be irrelevant to their purpose for attending college. Finally, instead of blaming grammatical conventions for their status as basic writers, these students spoke of an inability to transfer the thoughts in their heads onto paper successfully. Adler-Kassner states that we must address these issues when designing our basic writing courses and that we must first explain to students what this basic writer label means. After understanding the label,the students need to work to contest it. This may be accomplished through inquiry-based research during the class.

42. Adler-Kassner, Linda. "Review: Structure and Possibility: New Scholarship about Students-Called-Basic-Writers." College English 63.2 (2000): 229-43.
    Adler-Kassner discusses five important books that either explore basic writing and basic writers directly (Susan Gardner and Toby Fulwiler's Journal Book for Teachers of At-Risk College Writers [145]; Laura Gray-Rosendale's Rethinking Basic Writing [52]; and Michelle Hall Kells and Valerie Balester's Attending to the Margins [108]) or provide historical and social arguments relevant to theorizing and questioning the concept of basic writing (Stull's Amid the Fall, Dreaming of Eden and Freire's Pedagogy of Freedom). Adler-Kassner notes that research about basic writing students has changed from dwelling on what is wrong with basic writers to questioning the academic and social structures that perpetuate the "idea" of a basic writer. She finds that most of these books adopt the latter stance.
43. Bartholomae, David. "The Study of Error." College Composition and Communication 31.3 (1980): 253-69.
    Bartholomae extends Mina Shaughnessy's hope that teachers, especially basic writing teachers, will examine how they view errors in student writing. For example, he suggests that teachers who cannot understand student prose do not read the prose as complex texts and thus do not find the logic at work in many errors. Bartholomae demonstrates this point by showing the logic behind some student writing, drawing especially from the work of "John," who caught and corrected many of his errors while reading his paper aloud. Bartholomae ultimately offers a glimpse as to the effectiveness of error analysis and what it should accomplish: "It begins with the double perspective of text and reconstructed text and seeks to explain the difference between the two" (265). Overall, basic writing teachers need to separate performance from competence and focus on how to help students create strategies to accomplish each.

44. Bartholomae, David. "Writing on the Margins: The Concept of Literacy in Higher Education." A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Random House, 1987. 66-83.
    Marginal writers differ from mainstream writers in the number and kind of their grammatical errors and also in their methods of organizing, producing, and using texts. The precise nature of the fluency that separates marginal from mainstream academic literacy is explored in this examination of "borderline" texts. Beginning with Mina Shaughnessy's error analysis of basic writers' approximations of conventional sentences, Bartholomae argues that basic writers' use of language follows similar "styles of being wrong" (68). Academic literacy can be measured by the extent to which writers can appropriate the historical and social conventions of an already existing university discourse. Using historical and recent examples, the author analyzes writers' attempts to appropriate the language of the academy and suggests that basic writers should be assigned academic projects that will position them within its accepted discourses. Advanced literacy extends beyond the ability to use academic conventions successfully to a consciousness of speaking through appropriated forms and the capacity to push against them.
45. Bay, Libby. "Twists, Turns, and Returns: Returning Adult Students." Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. Ed. Susan Naomi Bernstein. Boston: Bedford, 2001. 167-75.
    Bay reports on a research project that she conducted involving students over the age of twenty-four at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York. Based on responses to questionnaires and one-on-one interviews, Bay concludes that adult students need help dealing with the unique issues they face when returning to school, and that faculty and the school itself need help understanding and addressing adult students needs. She recommends granting credit for adult students life experiences and requiring a separate orientation to help adult students deal with time-management other issues that they face.

46. Bizzell, Patricia. "Literacy in Culture and Cognition." A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Random House, 1987. 125-37.
    Bizzell suggests that literacy scholarship is commonly divided into two main schools of thought: those who embrace the "Great Cognitive Divide" theory, which posits that the acquisition of literacy is a stage in human cognitive development, and those who question this theory and focus instead on literacy as social practice. This latter group demonstrates that literacy ought not be treated monolithically but examined within social and cultural contexts. In applying literacy research to the question of whether American college students are literate, Bizzell argues for a definition of academic literacy that takes into account its social context and its specific social purposes. While debate continues about literacy of any kind, functional literacy-"literacy that confers a reasonable degree of education and economic success and political participation" (135)-enables critical reflection on the different relations between social groups and on the educational, economic, and political differences that separate them.
47. Bizzell, Patricia. "What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College?" College Composition and Communication 37.3 (1986): 294-301.
    Three theories, none satisfactory in itself, answer the question asked by the article's title. Basic writers experience a clash between their home dialects and the language of college; basic writers experience a clash between the discourse forms and genres of their worlds prior to college and the discourse forms and genres of formal college writing; and basic writers experience problems arising from their lack of cognitive development (as measured by the developmental schemes of Jean Piaget or William Perry). These three reductive theories can be synthesized into a comprehensive view by means of the notion of discourse community. What basic writers experience is a profound clash of world views. While the discourse communities from which basic writers emerge have not been studied in sufficient depth, it seems certain that the world view favored by the academy will challenge that of basic writers new to college. The academy requires a skeptical, questioning frame of mind (what Perry calls a world with "no Absolutes") and a rational choice of beliefs (what Perry calls "Commitments"), rather than unquestioning faith.
48. Eves-Bowden, Anmarie. "What Basic Writers Think about Writing." Journal of Basic Writing 20.2 (2001): 71-87.
    Eves-Bowden chronicles her study of seven basic writers at a California college, examining how they perceive of themselves as writers, how they view their writing processes, and how their writing processes "might limit [their] ability to succeed on a typical college writing assignment" (71). Eves-Bowden discovered that these writers did have a writing process, but one that was neither complex nor structured in any way. Most of the students admitted that they had no idea of what to say about an assigned topic, of how to generate any ideas, or of what revision entailed. As a result of her study, Eves-Bowden integrated Linda Flower and John Hayes's "cognitive process model" because "of its easy-to-follow diagram and simple explanations of each recursive step" (76). This particular approach provided her students with a structure from which they could "explore their beliefs, expectations, and perspectives" (81).
49. Fox, Tom. "Basic Writing as Cultural Conflict." Journal of Education 172.1 (1990): 65-83.
    Fox foregrounds the relationship between basic writing theories and the pedagogies that continue to marginalize students new to universities, including speakers of nonstandard English and, frequently, African Americans. Unfolding the pedagogical ideologies perpetuated by even the most well-meaning teachers, Fox illuminates inequities between the students' use of literacy to negotiate social identities and the institutions' authoritative positioning. He suggests that although recent explorations into discourse communities reveal differences and offer more helpful explanations, resultant pedagogies continue to be ineffective in dislodging the ideologies in which basic writing programs have been grounded. John Ogbu's theory of oppositional culture is offered as a more comprehensive ideological framework that "emphasizes the issues of historically based discrimination and the association of literacy as an instrument of domination" (74). As evidence of a need for a new consciousness in the classroom and political activism within the institution, Fox includes an essay, complete with "errors," written by a student in a basic writing course. He then describes how, in spite of the surface errors, the essay "is a successful piece of academic work" (80) in its use of literacy to "explore and discover connections and conflicts" (80) among the social contexts the student inhabits.
50. Gray-Rosendale, Laura. "Inessential Writings: Shaughnessy's Legacy in a Socially Constructed Landscape." Journal of Basic Writing 17.2 (1998): 43-75.
    Min-Zhan Lu's 1992 article "Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?" [216] inspired a flurry of feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist reexaminations of Mina Shaughnessy's work. These critiqued Shaughnessy on three counts: for forwarding an "essentialist" conception of language that separates thought from expression and views discourse as a transparent vessel for meaning; for promoting basic writers' accommodation to mainstream linguistic standards and thereby minimizing the political dimensions of language use; and for overlooking materialist considerations such as the economic, social, and institutional issues surrounding basic writers and the teaching of basic writing. Gray-Rosendale systematically explores each of these charges through close readings of critics' and Shaughnessy's texts and ultimately concludes that "Shaughnessy's works render ambiguous if not outright defy many such negative characterizations" (46).
51. Gray-Rosendale, Laura. "Investigating Our Discursive History: JBW and the Construction of the 'Basic Writer's' Identity." Journal of Basic Writing 18.2 (1999): 108-35.
    Focusing on research that has appeared in the Journal of Basic Writing, Gray-Rosendale reviews the history of basic writing and describes how this history has influenced the construction of basic writers' identities. She discusses how trends such as the growth, initiation, and conflict metaphors have influenced the way that the scholarship defined basic writers. Lastly, Gray-Rosendale discusses the current state of the basic writer's identity in basic writing scholarship and points toward the future of basic writers in our research.
52. Gray-Rosendale, Laura. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2000.
    Gray-Rosendale introduces her study by asking, "Who is the Basic Writer?" Quickly declaring that this question is not very useful, she asks, "What can and does the Basic Writer do?" (5) In addressing this generative question, Gray-Rosendale explores students' agency in an array of literacy tasks. Gray-Rosendale begins by using poststructural, ethnographic, and conversational theories for her analysis of a summer "bridge" course at Syracuse University designed for students considered "at risk by the higher administration" for failure in first-year composition (1). She then focuses on the interactions of the four students in one peer group in the class, analyzing their conversations about drafts of papers and showing how these students helped each other to make informed and remarkably diverse choices as they composed. After demonstrating some motivations for students' writing, she offers suggestions for teachers, administrators, and legislators.
53. Gray-Rosendale, Laura. "Revising the Political in Basic Writing Scholarship." Journal of Basic Writing 15.2 (1996): 24-49.
    Gray-Rosendale suggests that focusing on a definition of basic writers interferes with developing a complete, sound pedagogy. She argues that basic writers' definitions of themselves do not match those of basic writing faculty or higher-education administration, that their reflections of self have been largely ignored, and that their constructions of identity need to be forefronted. Her analysis of a conversation among four Syracuse University students during a reader review of a politically charged writing assignment demonstrates the complexities of these constructions. Gray-Rosendale recommends that studies of in-class interactions be done to determine how the students "construct new identities" (47). Such extended examination of student interactions is the next step for basic writing as a discipline.
54. Gray-Rosendale, Laura, Loyola K. Bird, and Judith F. Bullock. "Rethinking the Basic Writing Frontier: Native American Students Challenge to Our Histories." Journal of Basic Writing 22.1 (2003): 71-106.
    The three authors draw on their own experiences-as an administrator of a program serving many Native American basic writers (Gray-Rosendale), as a Jicarilla Apache Indian formerly classified as a basic writer and currently a graduate student in English (Bird), and as a tutor of Native American basic writers in a boarding high school (Bullock)-to challenge assumptions made about Native American writers and metaphors used in basic writing scholarship. The authors contend that many Native Americans face difficulties with writign in college because researchers have ignored them in basic writing research and the "myth of frontierism" (74) informs both basic writing studies and American ideology. Metaphors like "frontier," "pioneer," and "insider/outsider" (75), frequently used in basic writing, are based on a pioneer mentality in which the civilized university culture tames and assimilates the uncivilized Native Americans. The absence of a sustained critique of these metaphors and of the ways they are used to frame understandings of writers has led to an essentialist view of Native American students as English as a foreign language students largely unfamiliar with the culture of the academy. The authors urge teachers, administrators, and scholars to elicit stories from their Native American students by meeting on "Indian land" as "settlers" rather than "pioneers" (83).
55. Green, Ann E. "My Uncles Guns." Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. Ed. Susan Naomi Bernstein. Boston: Bedford, 2001. 35-44.
    In Green's short story a student is asked to write about an experience that has changed her life. The story intersperses the draft of the student's narrative with her thoughts-"intertexts"- about what she wants to say and what the assignment asks her to say. These intertexts seem to be in dialog with the draft she is producing and also with an imaginary conversation she is having with her audience-her teacher. The story addresses the distances between writer and instructor, educated and undereducated, rich and poor, young and old, and female and male.
56. Gruber, Sibylle. "On the Other Side of the Electronic Circuit: A Virtual Remapping of Border Crossings." Journal of Basic Writing 18.1 (1999): 55-75.
    Gruber questions the simplistic categorizing of students into majority and minority in this case study of an African American student's participation in a basic writing class's online discussions. Depending on the context of the discussion, the student occupies multiple subject positions-an ethnic minority, a majority male, and a minority homosexual-while recognizing the connection between being a gay black man in a white, patriarchal, homophobic society. Gruber argues that teachers must avoid homogenizing nontraditional students and recognize the multiple and complicated subjectivities reflected in their language use in online communities.
57. Harrington, Susanmarie. "The Representation of Basic Writers in Basic Writing Scholarship, or Who Is Quentin Pierce?" Journal of Basic Writing 18.2 (1999): 91-107.
    Harrington examines the research published in volumes 1-17 of the Journal of Basic Writing by reviewing trends in research topics. She reveals the tendency in the research to focus on teacher expectations rather than on student needs. The article argues that the research could be enriched by considering students and their voices when conducting and writing research.
58. Haswell, Richard H. Gaining Ground in College Writing: Tales of Development and Interpretation. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1991.
    Students arrive in writing classes in the midst of complex lives, bringing a great deal of knowledge with them. The changes they undergo as maturing, growing, changing organisms reflect influences throughout their personal, physical, and psychic histories, and the more developmental metaphors teachers employ to understand changes in students and themselves, the better teachers can describe and celebrate the ground students gain. Overlooking change in dimensions separate from writing, he argues, may mean missing evidence of students' gains. What appears to be regression to an earlier skill level may be daring experimentation that needs to be brought under control. What appears to be confidence in a given genre may be a retreat into a rhetorical safety zone. To study student writing, Haswell employs tales of development and interpretation from sources that range from Jean Piaget to William Wordsworth and from Erik Erikson to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Haswell demonstrates repeatedly that skill acquisition occurs as a result of competing tensions: as students experiment with new syntactical forms, they temporarily lose control of forms that had functioned reliably. Growth is a destabilizing activity, and the new always disrupts the status quo.
59. Hull, Glynda, Mike Rose, Kay Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano. "Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse." College Composition and Communication 42.3 (1991): 299-329.
    Explanations for the low achievement of some students have pointed to deficits within the student (via the student's character, intellect, environment, or culture). Thus, instructors working with remedial writers will easily enter a cycle in which they (1) ascribe a student's nonmainstream behaviors to a cognitive or social deficit, (2) construct their interaction with the student in response to that perceived deficit, and (3) limit the kinds of interactions and activities students are allowed in the classroom. Such limitations subsequently serve to eliminate discourse and activities that would disprove the deficit label or move the student and teacher beyond it. Evidence of this cycle is offered through analysis of classroom interactions between June, a well-trained writing instructor, and Maria, a student whose style of conversational turn-taking does not match that valued by June. This case, in which June constructs Maria as a remedial, scattered thinker-despite the cogency of much of Maria's commentary and her history of achievement in academic and literary pursuits-shows that teachers must pay closer attention to the complex dynamics surrounding classroom talk to avoid making misleading judgments about students' abilities and deficits.
60. Jackman, Mary Kay. "When the Personal Becomes Professional: Stories from Re-entry Adult Women Learners about Family, Work, and School." Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. Boston: Bedford, 2001. 151-65.
    Jackman's ethnographic study explores "narratives constitutive elements and epistemic value" (152) in the context of reentry adult women in a first-year college writing classroom. She situates her study in feminist theories and then uses three students' personal narratives to demonstrate that educators ideas about "material notions" in academic discourse deserve rethinking. Jackman concludes that nontraditional adult women learners benefit from John Dewey's notions of reflection and interpretation of experience. And while motivations for returning to school may vary-self-esteem, career advancement, more money-the act of storytelling is an important bridge between academic discourse and personal experience.
61. Kutz, Eleanor, Suzy Q. Groden, and Vivian Zamel. The Discovery of Competence: Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993.
    Over a ten-year period, the authors collaborated on a research project that engaged their urban basic writing students, whose primary language was not English, to engage in the work of an academic community. Their pedagogy was based on the premise that students can discover their own competence with language and writing through active learning and engagement in real language acts. Throughout the book, the authors focus on trying to understand how language is acquired; how teachers can facilitate students' development of this acquisition; how culture is represented through language; how thinking, speaking, and writing develop; how active inquiry facilitates these understandings; and how curricula can provide the necessary context for this learning to occur. Through their research, the authors recognized that students learned the structure of writing and language through active engagement and practice with written language in a collaborative environment in which they were expected to build on their knowledge and reflect on their learning processes.

62. Liese, Daniela. "Review Essay on Marilyn Sternglass's Time to Know Them." Journal of Basic Writing 18.1 (1999): 21-26.
    Liese affirms the need for Marilyn Sternglass's Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level [74], which examines nine City College of New York students' academic and personal lives. Liese argues that Sternglass's conclusions (that these students can succeed against overwhelming odds if given the time necessary to learn and if time is taken to know them) are valid. Sternglass contends that political decisions directly impacting the funding available for higher education and the administrative call for writing assessment tests made the situation for basic writers more troublesome in the late 1990s than it was when Mina Shaughnessy wrote Errors and Expectations [113] about students at City College of New York in the 1970s. Time to Know Them is a plea to recognize the possibility of success and what can be done to foster that success.
63. Lunsford, Andrea A. "Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer." College English 41.1 (1979): 38-46.
    Based on her study of basic writers at Ohio State University, Lunsford argues that basic writers have not attained the level of cognitive development required to succeed at college-level work. Because they have not developed the cognitive ability to decenter themselves to perform tasks that require synthesis and analysis, basic writers have difficulty forming abstract concepts. Lunsford recommends that basic writing teachers use various strategies, ranging from grammar and sentence-building activities to essay assignments, to engage students in inferential reasoning rather than in isolated drill exercises and rule memorization. Working in small-group workshops, basic writing students should be allowed to practice analyzing, generalizing, and then abstracting, all of which are skills that they need to succeed in college.
64. Minot, Walter S., and Kenneth R. Gamble. "Self-Esteem and Writing Apprehension of Basic Writers: Conflicting Evidence." Journal of Basic Writing 10.2 (1991): 116-24.
    The notion that self-esteem and writing apprehension can define basic writers as a distinct homogenous group is challenged by the results of an empirical study. Basic writing does not seem to acknowledge that basic writing students are a heterogeneous population with diverse, individual writing difficulties, basic writing labels them as a predictable, constant group. This study consists of sixteen sections of regular composition and three sections of basic writing, and the data gathered indicate the potential that self-esteem and writing apprehension may have in writing situations. Remarkably, one basic writing section "had lower writing apprehension and higher self-esteem than sixteen classes of regular composition" (121). These results suggest that conflating self-esteem and writing apprehension limits the affective, cognitive, developmental, social, and cultural influences and expectations that basic writers bring to their writing. Rather than dismissing self-esteem and writing apprehension, however, this study calls for more research and writing on the "emotional atmosphere" (122) that surrounds the different writing situations of basic writers and on the role of teachers within this affective space.
65. Mutnick, Deborah. Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education. Portsmouth: Boynton, 1996.
    Mutnick profiles four older, urban, minority basic writing students who take an intensive six-credit basic reading and writing course for two terms. Each case study focuses on a piece of writing the student chooses and on related interviews with the student, the instructor, and sometimes other instructors. The papers, handwritten or typed, are reproduced in the book with instructor comments. Both students and teachers are asked to read the paper aloud and comment on the text while reading. Thus, a dialogue "between the written texts and the 'metacommentary'" (xxi) is created. Student writers and writing teachers are asked similar questions about their family backgrounds, educational experiences, roles as student or teacher, and the meaning of "being a writer" and "learning to write" to them. Mutnick also describes her own background and attitudes. In essence, the study compares the "readings" of the various participants: the basic writing students who composed the texts, their instructors' or additional instructors' readings of those texts, and Mutnick's readings of the texts and of the overall situation.
66. Piorkowski, Joan L., and Erika Scheurer. "'It Is the Way That They Talk to You': Increasing Agency in Basic Writers through a Social Context of Care." Journal of Basic Writing 19.2 (2000): 72-92.
    The authors conducted interviews and designed a questionnaire to portray two kinds of basic writers: those who became more confident in acquiring agency over their work and those who remained relatively distrustful of available assistance. Susan McLeod's work on the role of affective factors in writing and Chris M. Anson's interpretation of William Perry's categories of cognitive development of college-level students are used to back up the authors' findings that students' perception of their instructors' care is as important to students' success as their understanding of feedback and acceptance of assistance with their work. The study also reveals how students use other sources (friends, peers) when they do not trust the ones that are available in writing centers. Students' responsibility for their writing, the authors conclude, comes in response to a surrounding context that includes care.
67. Rose, Mike. "Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism." College Composition and Communication 39.3 (1988): 267-300.
    Rose summarizes trends in cognitive science-field dependence and independence, brain hemispherics, Jean Piaget's stages of cognitive development, and orality and literacy-and discusses their implications for writing instruction. His social constructivist perspective drives this analysis, and he reveals severe limitations for the practical application of any of these cognitive theories, which have caused stereotyping and the privileging of certain styles because of cultural biases, to writing instruction. Rose's research clarifies the problems associated with attempting to read writing through the limited lenses of clinical psychological research. Class, race, gender, and other differences must be considered in the results, since social factors such as these "should not automatically be assumed to reflect 'pure' cognitive differences but rather effects that may well be conditioned by and interpreted in lieu of historical, sociopolitical realities" (297).
68. Rossen-Knill, Deborah, and Kim Lynch. "A Method for Describing Basic Writers and Their Writing Lessons from a Pilot Study." Journal of Basic Writing 19.2 (2000): 93-123.
    Rossen-Knill and Lynch present a holistic method for describing basic writers and their writing to encourage classroom research at two- and four-year colleges and to enable comparisons of basic writers across institutions. Their method grows out of a pilot study of basic writers and writing at two community colleges and one four-year private college that centers on a survey of the basic writers' backgrounds; "back talk," through which students respond to the authors' preliminary interpretations of the survey; and analysis of student writing for use of conventional discourse features and for rate, type, and seriousness of error. Rossen-Knill and Lynch offer some preliminary results from their pilot study to illustrate the type of findings their approach yields and to highlight the importance of such findings to classroom instruction.
69. Shaughnessy, Mina P. "Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing." College Composition and Communication 27.3 (1976): 234-39.
    In the partnership between teachers and basic writers, the basic writer is perceived as the party who progresses. Discussion thus centers on student needs and attitudes rather than teacher changes that may be the key to student progress. Teacher transformation at various stages of working with basic writers is described through metaphor in a developmental scale. In the stage called Guarding the Tower, teachers are committed to protecting academic tradition from unprepared interlopers; in Converting the Natives, teachers come to perceive basic writers as empty vessels capable of learning the mechanics of language and essay structure; in Sounding the Depths, teachers shift from studying the students to studying writing as a behavior, error as a revealing logic, and the role of teacher as pedagogical planner; in Diving In, teachers realize and accept the need to remediate themselves regarding the needs and learning styles of basic writers.
70. Slattery, Patrick J. "Applying Intellectual Development Theory to Composition." Journal of Basic Writing 9.2 (1990): 54-65.
    Debates over intellectual development theory persist, as developmentalists argue that students gain increased sophistication and complexity in thinking about multiple perspectives and personal judgments. Slattery argues that students progress through three levels-binary dualism, multiplistic thinking, and critical relativism, when they make contingent, tentative judgments about why some points of view are better than others. Twelve first-year students (nine female, three male) were studied at Indiana University and asked to describe noteworthy elements in their work. Given papers representing the three developmental levels, students were asked to rank the examples and explain their choices. Students confronted the work from all levels of intellectual development theory and perceived differences among disciplines. Affective responses and disciplinary assumptions also influenced student approaches to texts. First-year students face divergent points of view from all levels of knowing identified in intellectualdevelopment theory, so writing assignments should not force all students to progress through the levels of development at the same time.
71. Stenberg, Shari. "Learning to Change: The Development of a (Basic) Writer and Her Teacher." Journal of Basic Writing 21.2 (2002): 37-55.
    Using Joseph Harris's discussion of metaphors for teaching, Stenberg asserts that teachers must consider how they construct their own identities. Regardless of pedagogy, most instructors still adopt in some measure the posture of "expert, authority, hero" (37). Using her work with a student, Linda, Stenberg explores two questions-"How do particular basic writers construct their own identities?" and "How do we teachers construct our own identities in relation to basic writers?"- to present a "two-way dynamic" in which both teacher and student undergo "revision" together (38). Stenberg tracks her own assumptions about and responses to Lindas self-definition as a writer, Linda's race and cultural position, and Linda's attitude toward help with grammar. Stenberg states, "I was trying to name and respond to her identity apart from her when, in fact, my pedagogy needed to be made with her" (46). Teachers, then, must strive to create pedagogies that focus on students self-definitions-on what students bring to writing rather than on what teachers posit is lacking. A shared process will emerge that will certainly be "messier" than conventional processes but also will foster the development of students, teachers, and responsive pedagogies (53).
72. Sternglass, Marilyn S. "The Changing Perception of the Role of Writing: From Basic Writing to Discipline Courses." BWe: Basic Writing e-Journal 2.2 (2000): www.asu.edu/clas/english/composition/cbw/summer_2000_V2N2.htm#marilyn.
    Drawing on a six-year longitudinal study at an urban university, Sternglass uses the comments of several students to show how they used writing to learn. Students revealed that writing was helpful to memory tasks. Writing, they reported, helped them with critical tasks, such as criticism, analysis, and assessment. Students' comments and results from the study suggest that critical abilities develop gradually. Exposing the students to and having them use academic language helped basic writing students develop the analytical abilities expected in upper-level courses. When students commented on how the process of learning through writing helped throughout their college years, they discussed how early reliance on textbook language led to their later ability to put their own ideas into words. Sternglass suggests writing assignments that allow basic writing students to practice analytical tasks. She also suggests reading assignments that relate general issues to students' own experiences and writing tasks that help students understand concepts as well as language.
73. Sternglass, Marilyn S. "Students Deserve Enough Time to Prove They Can Succeed." Journal of Basic Writing 18.1 (1999): 3-20.
    Sternglass uses a six-year study of a basic skills student from the City College of New York to argue that given sufficient time and support, students who begin college in a basic writing program have the potential to succeed and do succeed. The study's findings show that colleges must provide the opportunities for students to obtain the skills and knowledge necessary for academe.
74. Sternglass, Marilyn S. Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1997.
    Sternglass's book is a six-year study of college writers enrolled in one of three courses at the City College of New York in the fall of 1989: two levels of basic writing and one first-year composition course. Fifty-three students initially agreed to participate in the study. Sternglass provides extensive background information for nine students and detailed case studies of five of these students. In a heartening report that counters negative assessments of at-risk students' success rates, Sternglass reports that by June 1996, 66 percent of these students had either graduated from college or were still enrolled. The case studies focus both on the complex, arduous path that students must take through college and on students' encounters with writing and learning in their college courses. Based on these observations, Sternglass encourages composition teachers to develop courses and assignments that fully articulate how facts and details support claims. The institutional and instructional contexts for student learning also receive careful attention. Sternglass demonstrates the importance of teacher commentary that addresses surface level issues, but also focuses on the rhetorical realms of content, ideas, and complexity. Sternglass observes courses across the disciplines and suggests that supportive but rigorous instruction will encourage students to succeed.

75. Stotsky, Sandra. "On Learning to Write About Ideas." College Composition and Communication 37.3 (1986): 276-93.
    Stotsky reports on her research study of linguistic differences between good and poor writing. Her subjects were tenth-grade students writing essays for holistic evaluation. The writers were asked to state a position on a topic and support it. After the essays were evaluated by professional writing teachers, the study used a sample of essays judged to be the lowest- and highest-level essays. Two areas were described and analyzed: number and variety of words used and elements of cohesion. Stotsky found that better writers used a greater range of words to express their ideas than poorer students and that better writers made assertions about concepts and objects, whereas poorer students' writing tended to be more egocentric. The better writers also created more lexical ties of all kinds. Lexical analysis indicates that poorer writers maintain markers of orality, treating writing as a conversation rather than a transaction. Stotsky suggests that the information and analyses can be used to examine growth in the writing of basic writers. Findings also suggest strategies for teaching basic writers.
76. Stygall, Gail. "Resisting Privilege: Basic Writing and Foucault's Author Function." College Composition and Communication 45.3 (1994): 320-41.
    Michel Foucault's author function becomes a conceptual structure to show how basic writers are constructed and inscribed by institutions. Teachers of basic writers should resist reinscription of institutional norms through questioning and challenging how the author function positions basic writers in the English departments and in the university. More specifically, Stygall explores how certain discursive practices support the academically privileged and how those discursive practices are ignored or used specifically to privilege a certain group. Stygall describes a research project that studied correspondence between graduate student teachers in the author's teacher development class and basic writing students from a different university. This research began with the hope that teachers could avoid reinscribing basic writers by becoming aware of the discursive practices that reinforced this notion. Throughout this research, the social and institutional pressures that basic writers and the teachers faced with such a correspondence were explored. Stygall concludes the essay with a reflection on the research project as well as some information about what the teachers in this study have done to change their perceptions of basic writers.
77. Sudol, David. "Basic Rhetoric: Selling ENG 100." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 16.1 (1989): 23-28.
    Sudol's students are not open-admission students but "mainstream college freshmen, the privileged children of America's middle class" (24) placed in basic writing because of their writing scores on the SAT, ACT, or FPE (Freshman Placement Exam). Encountering resistance, Sudol "sold" the course by telling his students that they were not remedial but inexperienced in the kinds of writing college demands. Sudol also argues that learning how to respond to writing gives students the vocabulary they need to write in college and develop the skills needed to evaluate others' writing, the kind of preparation for reading and writing college requires.
78. Tinberg, Howard. "Teaching in the Spaces Between: What Basic Writing Students Can Teach Us." Journal of Basic Writing 17.2 (1998): 76-90.
    Tinberg points out that both the political right and the intellectual left have criticized the basic writing enterprise. Basic writing students are largely silent during these debates, even though the outcomes directly impact them. In writing about literacy and education, Tinberg's basic writers demonstrate an understanding of the complexity of the terms and teach him to "reconsider the value of nonschool learning" (83). Basic writing instruction must challenge and respect the unique knowledge and logic that basic writers bring to the classroom. A productive turn for basic writing research, Tinberg suggests, would be to begin asking the crucial question, "Whose responsibility is it to promote broad-based literacy in this nation?" (89).
79. Villanueva, Victor. "Theory in the Basic Writing Classroom? A Practice." Journal of Basic Writing 16.1 (1997): 79-90.
    Villanueva argues that teachers should view their basic writers not as cognitively deficient but, instead, as individuals who need to connect what they know with what the academy wants them to know. When Villanueva began scholarship in composition, most studies of basic writers reflected a cognitivist perspective. This research made claims about basic writers, suggesting they were basic because of their lack of cognitive abilities. The author questions this notion and considers how he could encourage basic writers, help them believe in their abilities with writing and language, and show them respect for who they are as learners, thinkers, and writers. To demonstrate his approach to basic writing, he provides a script of the first day of class. He is careful to show various student responses to his script and he hopes that the ones who stay realize that as college students they need to learn certain conventions.