It’s What’s on the Inside That Counts: Analyzing Student Use of Sources in Composition Research Papers

Objective – This study is designed to discover what kinds of sources are cited by composition students in the text of their papers and to determine what types of sources are used most frequently. It also examines the relationship of bibliographies to in-text citations to determine whether students “pad” their bibliographies with traditional academic sources not used in the text of their papers. Methods – The study employs a novel method grounded in multidisciplinary research, which the authors used to tally 1,652 in-text citations from a sample of 71 student papers gathered from English Composition II courses at three universities in the United States. These data were then compared against the papers’ bibliographic references, which had previously been categorized using the WHY Method. Results – The results indicate that students rely primarily on traditional academic and journalistic sources in their writing, but also incorporate a significant and diverse array of other kinds of source material. The findings identify a strong institutional effect on student source use, as well as the average number and type of in-text citations, which demographic characteristics do not explain. Additionally, the study demonstrates that student bibliographies are highly predictive of in-text source selection, and that students do not exhibit a pattern of “padding” bibliographies with academic sources. Conclusion – The data warrant the conclusions that an understanding of one’s own institution is vitally important for effective work with students regarding their source selection, and that close analysis of student bibliographies gives an unexpectedly reliable picture of the types and proportions of sources cited in student writing.

The relationship between the component composition of the body and the rate of aging of student youth

Were examined 120 young men and young women. The analysis of the component composition was carried out using bioimpedance analysis by the MEDASS device. The coefficient of the aging rate was calculated according to the formula of A.G. Gorelkina. A correlation was established between the components of body composition and the rate of aging. The probability of accelerated aging of the body increases in the presence of excess fat mass. 25% of young men and 18.3% of young women belong to the risk group with an increased content of adipose tissue and a reduced content of skeletal muscles. Key words: aging, biological age, body component composition, students.

Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition: Accuracy and Lexical and Syntactic Complexity

First-year composition courses must balance a range of writing instruction priorities including genre and audience awareness with language instruction, particularly for second-language writers. Despite the attested efficacy of dynamic written corrective feedback for language gains in intensive English programs, little research has investigated dynamic written corrective feedback in supporting language and discourse development among L2 first-year composition students. In the present study, pre- and post-test writing from 63 second-language first-year composition writers was analyzed for grammatical accuracy as well as lexical and syntactic complexity. Writers with dynamic written corrective feedback intervention ( n = 30) failed to outperform a control group on nearly all measures, and in fact made significantly more verb errors and demonstrated significantly less syntactic complexity over time compared to the control group. Results suggest that while dynamic written corrective feedback is efficacious in some settings, it may be at cross purposes with other first-year composition discourse-based goals such as genre and audience awareness.

Cabinet of Curiosities, a Dwelling Place

This Instagram “Weekly Writing” assignment is a social-media-based, low-stakes, and longitudinal approach to teaching and experimenting with multimodal composition. Students create an account for the purposes of the class and follow each other. They post three times per week, sometimes freely and sometimes in response to a prompt or challenge. Together, we use the platform and its rich multimodal resources to consider how in-the-moment multimodal composing can spur invention, place the writer in the perpetual position of noticing, and create an archive of experience that holistically communicates beyond the author’s original intention. This article discusses the pedagogical rationale for this approach, along with the issues to consider before adopting and adapting this practice.

Google Docs in Undergraduate online Composition Class

Google Docs, as a collaborative online writing tool in Higher Education, facilitates and enhances the Composition pedagogical practices in face-to-face and virtual classes. The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate the students’ learning styles’ impact on their Peer Assessment using Google Docs. Participants included 149 Composition students in a Public Health College of a private university in New York City. The statistical findings of this study revealed that students’ learning skills in online writing classes could drive their perceptions of using Google Docs as a Peer Assessment Writing tool. These findings highlight the high correlation between students’ desire to interact after writing in English and their perceptions of using Google Docs as a collaborative writing tool. The findings also revealed statistically significant relationships between students’ perceptions of using Google Docs and their preferences of receiving feedback in different language areas. An increase in students’ perception of receiving feedback on their grammar, the flow of ideas, mechanics, quality of ideas, and Vocabulary, in that order, strongly led to an increase in their perceptions of using Google Docs. However, the findings indicate that there was no statistically significant linear relationship between students’ perceptions of their technical skills and their perceptions of using Google Docs in their online writing classes. Median Google Docs’s perceptions of males and females were not statistically different. There were no statistically significant differences in students’ Perceptions of Using Google Docs across the various age groups.

When Teaching Composition Becomes an Art Through a Futuristic Book-Writing Pedagogy

The author recognizes the importance of Freshman Composition students being equipped with the skills necessary to write effectively for college and beyond. In this chapter, the author shares her story of how a renowned Composition professor forces her to take a self-critical look at what she was doing in her Composition classroom, which compels her to change. For new teachers of Composition or for teachers looking to change, the author shares her newly adopted student-centered-book-writing pedagogy, which puts the focus on the student and creating an environment in which they can write, and write a lot. The author, forced to be honest and change herself, adopted a pedagogy that allows her students a voice and a chance to be honest in their writing through their expression of voice, an asset she recognizes as necessary in this 21st century, especially in our increasingly diversified world of academia. The author shares her student-centered-book-writing-pedagogy.

A World in Crisis

The author, a college composition teacher, recognizes we are living in a time of global crisis, fighting battles on two fronts. On the one hand, we are living in a period that sees us exposed to COVID-19, a pandemic that is threatening lives across the globe with no apparent end in sight. Then we have the social injustice that is racism rearing its vile and ugly head, resulting in the highlighting of the Black Lives Matter movement. Believing that freshman composition teachers are ideally positioned to encourage students to share their views on the crises that we are currently living through, this author uses a student-centered-book-writing pedagogy and asks her students to write a book on what they are burning to tell the world about COVID-19 or the Black Lives Matter movement. In this article, the author shares excerpts of her freshman composition students' writings and briefly discusses her student-centered-book-writing pedagogy.

Sounding Shakespeare: An Interdisciplinary Educational Design Project in English and Music

This article outlines Sounding Shakespeare, an interdisciplinary project in Music and English, carried out with student teachers in Norway. The aims of the project are to explore and develop new ways of working with Shakespeare cross-curricularly through educational design research, focusing on creative and aesthetic processes in order for student teachers to gain experience in working across subjects, and to decrease their fear factor of using Shakespeare in the classroom. The current curriculum changes in Norwegian primary and secondary education (Fagfornyelsen) focus on experimentation, exploration and creative processes, and these are guiding educational principles that also provide a foundation for the Sounding Shakespeare project. Our research into student teachers’ experiences of working with Shakespeare’s texts, constitute the starting point for this article. In the project, students worked in two different workshops with Speech and Music Composition to collaborate and devise a performance based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream as their focus text. Through voice and prosody, students explored the musicality of Shakespeare’s text, and through music composition, students experimented with soundscapes in creative processes. In the final part of the workshops, students collaborated towards performances. Based on our collected data, our main finding shows how music can become a guiding agent for a meaningful experience of literature.