Jones argues that while textbooks stabilize courses often organized at the last moment for adjunct instructors, help instructors link reading and writing, and are safe in their familiarity, they also often place needless philosophical and monetary restraints on teachers and students alike. These textbooks rarely fit an instructor or class population completely and are often directed at traditional-age first-year college students rather than returning learners. Jones calls for close analysis of textbook dependence in basic writing classes and a knowledgeable choice about when to use them. The author suggests that by examining often unconscious dependencies on textbooks in basic writing classrooms, instructors will be able to creatively reexamine classroom activities and more closely approach course goals.
Moran explores the hypothesis that students who read their writing aloud produce more successful drafts than students who do not. Moran notes a correlation between reading ability and the efficacy of this activity. Reading drafts aloud was beneficial to students with adequate or good reading skills but did not make any significant difference in the case of poor readers. The first stage of the research involved investigating students' writing processes. Poor writers often wrote a single draft of a paper and made only superficial changes during the revising process. Stronger writers, by contrast, completed more drafts, revised more thoroughly, and began by revising content and style before looking at issues of mechanics and structure. The second stage involved secondary research about the relationship between drafting and revising aloud, and Moran mentions that the findings of much of the research agree with her hypothesis. In the third stage, Moran describes a classroom experiment that was designed to test the validity of her hypothesis that the more proficient readers would read their drafts aloud and score higher on the essay and that the experimental group would read their drafts aloud more often than students in the control group. The first assertion was not definitively proven; however, the second seems to have been correct. As a result of her experiment, Moran was convinced that reading essay drafts aloud is beneficial to basic writers who are also proficient readers but is not beneficial to students who do not engage in reading with any degree of frequency.
Remler describes student-centered activities for reading literature and for grammar instruction. Foregrounding her work in Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy of learning and in definitions of active learning, Remler discusses three categories of active learning strategies that can help to shape a student-centered classroom. First, students collaboratively create three questions for quizzes on classroom reading. Second, students teach standard English concepts in groups, providing their own examples to illustrate a concept. Third, in literature classes, students create lessons and give presentations to the rest of the class. Remler concludes, as her title suggests, by emphasizing, "The more active students are in the learning process, the better" (80).
Basic writers tend toward what Wolfgang Iser calls "consistency building" (179), seeking main ideas and familiar concepts rather than attending to multiple interpretations and textual inconsistencies. Thus, reading instruction that includes analysis of how readers construct meaning and interact with texts is integral to the basic writing class. As writers become more actively involved in constructing textual meanings through reading, their writing begins to exhibit recognition of inconsistencies, alternative interpretations, and disagreement. Salvatori's research suggests that reading has a greater impact on writing than previously thought.
Spigelman explores basic writing students' resistance-expressed largely through silence-to Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary [111]. Using Rose's text, Spigelman encouraged her students to explore and critique educational and institutional inequities such as those that Rose faced and that many of her students likely also faced. While in their essays many students identified personally with Rose's struggles, they resisted larger cultural critique: they rejected any notion that the system was to blame and read Lives on the Boundary as an American success story. Interpreting her students' refusal to speak about the failures and exclusions of education as rhetorics of silence, Spigelman argues that despite students' confusion and discomfort, compositionists should not abandon the ethical and political implications of writing instruction, but neither should we ignore the implications of those silences. Finally, citing a discussion she had with Rose, Spigelman urges compositionists to address these contradictions and conflicts through creativity and imagination-first by helping students to see inequalities and then by helping students reimagine alternatives.