Basic/Developmental Writing

This is a 50 question objective final for Developmental English/Writing with an answer key. There are nine sections: (1) Subject-Verb Agreement, (2) Comma Rules, (3) Paragraphs, (4) Irregular Verbs, (5) Run-Ons & Fragments, (6) Quotation Marks, (7) Apostrophes, (8) Writing (Prewriting, Introductions, Thesis Statements, & Conclusions), and (9) Parts of Speech. The Answer Key is the second link/document at this site.

An introduction to a special issue of BWe: Basic Writing E-Journal on the adult learner and basic writing. This intro essay provides background on both adult learning theory and the adult learner in basic writing contexts, as well as introducing the focus of the issue and articles within.

We examine the explanatory weight of child-related and contextual factors on first graders’ achievements in spelling and separation between words. The participants were 215 kindergartners, 113 boys and 102 girls (M = 5 years 4 months, SD = 4 months) from both monolingual and bilingual communities in Spain. They were native speakers of Spanish in the monolingual communities and bilingual Spanish/Catalan or Spanish/Basque speakers in the bilingual communities and had Catalan and Basque, respectively, as the language of instruction. The three languages have shallow orthographies. Children were first examined in kindergarten in a number of literacy related abilities (e.g., knowledge of letters, writing) to detect predictors of spelling and separation between words that were, in turn, evaluated at the end of first grade of elementary school. All the participants were assessed in their language of instruction. The best explanatory models were those including interactions among child-level factors and between these factors and contextual variables. Only knowledge of writing in kindergarten appeared as the common explanatory factor for first graders’ attainments. Attainments in spelling were predicted by children’s level of literacy and knowledge of letters moderated by parent’s education; performance in word separation was predicted by phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge moderated by parental education. Teaching practices affected spelling performance but not learning to separate between words.

There has been a growth in students with dyslexia attending university. These students commonly rate writing as one of their greatest problem areas. Our research set out to describe the effects of dyslexia on the writing skills of students compared to
age-matched peers and a spelling-skill-matched group. Generally, the texts of the students with dyslexia were poorer than age controls but not poorer than the spelling- skill controls. However, there were no major differences in “higher order” skills
such as ideas and organization with the chronological age controls, only in “lower order” transcription skills such as spelling and handwriting fluency. The students with dyslexia made more spelling errors in their essays than one would predict given their
dictated spelling skills.

Background. It is well established that handwriting fluency constrains writing quality by limiting resources for higher order processes such as planning and reviewing. According to the ‘simple view of writing’ then slow keyboarding speed should hinder
the quality of keyboarded essay compositions in the same way that slow handwriting hinders handwritten essay compositions. Given a lack of touch-typing instruction in UK schools it was hypothesized that children’s written compositions produced via the keyboard would be worse than produced by hand.
Aims. To extend the work of Christensen (2004) and Rogers and Case-Smith (2002) by examining the relationship between handwriting fluency and keyboarding fluency throughout the primary school and studying the link between word-processed
compositional quality and keyboarding fluency.
Samples and methods. The handwriting fluency and keyboarding fluency of 300 children in primary school were measured. Year 5 and year 6 children completed a measure of compositional quality by hand and by keyboard.
Results and comment. There was a high correlation between handwriting and keyboarding speed and handwriting speed was consistently faster than keyboarding speed across all ages. Only a small minority of children in years 5 and 6 had faster keyboarding than handwriting speed. Results showed that children’s compositional quality was superior in the handwritten scripts as opposed to the keyboarded scripts. Keyboarded scripts were up to 2 years behind handwritten scripts in development. Writing by keyboard does not necessarily lead to improvements in script quality, compared with handwritten scripts. Explicit keyboarding instruction (touch-typing) is needed to develop keyboarding fluency and unlock the full potential of the word processor for children’s writing.

Co-authored with Betsy Allan

This article examines two course redesigns undertaken to improve student support, learning, and retention in the basic writing program at Oakland University, a doctoral research university in southeast Michigan, where support for developmental writers has fluctuated dramatically between nurture and neglect over the past fifty years. However, current conditions--including the creation of a new department of writing and rhetoric and a university-wide commitment to student support and retention--have set the stage for dramatic revisions to the way our basic writing and supervised study courses are administered. Over the last five years, the writing and rhetoric department at Oakland has revised both of these courses to better align them with our first-year writing program's focus on rhetoric, research, revision, and reflection.

This essay presents a semester long partnership between two courses at different institutions-one in a local high school, the other at a four-year public university-as a community form of community engaged pedagogy with the potential to subvert Neoliberal assumptions about our students and their writing. Our project inspects the notions of literacy that our students have internalized about themselves and others, interrogates the "value" Neoliberalism ascribes to different forms of literacy, and seeks out ways to center our students' literacies that foreground the power these often institutionally dismissed literacies can have.

The course we describe here was designed especially for students enrolled in a collaborative program between Texas A&M University–Commerce and Konkuk University in South Korea. This course was created specifically for students who did not earn a qualifying score on a standardized placement exam required of all first-year students for enrollment into “college-level” English 1301. For this course, a team consisting of several graduate teaching assistants, instructors, a linguistic specialist, and the writing program admin- istrator combined strategies for teaching basic writing and English as a second language (ESL) to create a pilot “sheltered instruction” program, one that provided additional support to all Korean students enrolled in basic writ- ing courses. This support included an additional “lab” that each student was required to attend; their lab teacher was present in each English 1301 class, as well, to answer questions and support instruction. Every Konkuk student enrolled in the pilot program passed the course and enrolled in English 1302 along with their cohorts who were considered “college ready.”

This qualitative case study considered the following question: How did an open door policy combined with limitations of a rural setting impact students' developmental English writing needs and curricular responses at one Pacific island community college? The focus institution was a small community college serving several Micronesian islands with a total population of around 50,000. Guided by a Context, Input, Process, Output (CIPO) model, I employed institutional document analysis, on-site observation, discussions and interviews with teachers, samples of students' work, and interviews with students to understand the social setting (Context), learner skills and experiences (Input), the curriculum (Process), and how institutional responses (Output) addressed students' needs. Results indicated that students' writing needs were complex as a result of unreadiness for college writing combined with their wide-ranging goals. Although the institution responded with a developmental English writing sequence, resources constrained this response. Course offerings were slender, and teachers possessed limited qualifications for this work. Thus, more innovative and responsive practices in developmental English were not enacted. Also, all teachers were off-island cultural outsiders; this had important pedagogical implications. Overall, since the community college open-door policy invites the developmental learner, providing for the needs of these individuals is critical. Yet, this is a resource-intensive undertaking. This demonstration of how resource constraints impacted developmental English learners is important in foregrounding challenges for other small-scale, high-diversity, rural schools. It also sheds light on one more challenge facing Pacific Island people.

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This profile articulates the authors’ response to a statewide mandate to eliminate “remedial” writing instruction at four-year public universities, including their own. The profile describes the difficulties the authors faced in responding to this initiative, given the context of their regional comprehensive university and its specific challenges with retention and student success, and discusses their revision of the university’s writing program. The changes the authors made— eliminating a non-credit basic writing course and creating a credit-bearing basic writing course; instituting guided self-placement; and developing a flexible, WPA-outcomes based writing curriculum—have led to improved satisfaction, success, and retention rates among basic writers at their institution. In the fall of 2008, a series of events emerged which created the conditions for a major overhaul of the writing program here at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW), a regional, comprehensive u...

Writing skills typically develop over a course of more than two decades as a child matures and learns the craft of composition through late adolescence and into early adulthood. The novice writer progresses from a stage of knowledge-telling to a stage of knowledge-transforming characteristic of adult writers. Professional writers advance further to an expert stage of knowledge-crafting in which representations of the author's planned content, the text itself, and the prospective reader's interpretation of the text are routinely manipulated in working memory.

Knowledge-transforming, and especially knowledge-crafting, arguably occur only when sufficient executive attention is available to provide a high degree of cognitive control over the maintenance of multiple representations of the text as well as planning conceptual content, generating text, and reviewing content and text. Because executive attention is limited in capacity, such control depends on reducing the working memory demands of these writing processes through maturation and learning. It is suggested that students might best learn writing skills through cognitive apprenticeship training programs that emphasize deliberate practice.

This 50 question objective final exam for Developmental English/Writing has nine sections: (1) Subject-Verb Agreement, (2) Comma Rules, (3) Paragraphs, (4) Irregular Verbs, (5) Run-Ons & Fragments, (6) Quotation Marks, (7) Apostrophes, (8) Writing, & (9) Parts of Speech.