Many students entering junior college English classrooms have serious problems due to their educational or environmental backgrounds. Programs with integrated curriculums have been developed to help these students by making English more relevant to their lives.

This thesis will deal with five points of emphasis--content, logic, organization, demon errors, and style. Not a complete manual for teaching freshman composition, this thesis will serve as a simplified guide. This thesis is written for the inexperienced teacher of freshman English who may need guidance, but it should also be of interest to the experienced teacher who wants to confirm his own practices or to find new approaches for teaching the college freshman how to write.

The purpose of this investigation is to determine the factors that are associated with freshman students who make superior marks in freshman college English and with students who make failing marks in freshman college English.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of determining the relative effectiveness of the Christensen Rhetoric Program and of a traditional write-revise approach in freshman English composition classes.

Today's colleges and universities are faced with the challenges of reforming their curriculums in an effort to hold a generation of students who are now demanding more than just a degree. Today prominent writers in the field of higher education point to the necessity of assessing and reconstructing college courses so that new direction will be provided. Each student entering college for the first time usually must enroll in an English composition course. Such a course offers great potential to encourage the creative capacity of the incoming student and foster an attitude of personal inquiry. The diversity of subjects and intentions which can be introduced in the beginning composition course offers a healthy reservoir of opportunity for exploring personal meaning. Introducing some of the goals and concepts of creativity may thus inspire the design of a new course given to meeting the challenges of higher education.The problem of this study was to develop a course in freshman English composition based on the theories of creativity and directed towards the development of the student's creative and critical capacity.

For teachers of freshman English composition, the most time-consuming aspect of teaching is responding to student papers (Anson, 2012; Straub, 2000b). Teachers respond in various ways, but most teachers agree that they should offer written feedback to students (Beach & Friedrich, 2006). However, little research has been conducted to determine how teachers’ written feedback practices reflect their beliefs about the purpose of such feedback. This qualitative study explores the relationship between English composition teachers’ beliefs about written feedback and their actual written feedback practices. The participants were a sample of four instructors of freshman English composition at a mid-sized metropolitan public university. Interviews, classroom observations, course documents, and samples of teachers’ written comments were analyzed to determine teachers’ written response practices and their beliefs related to the purposes of freshman writing and their roles as writing teachers. Results suggest that teachers were aware of their beliefs, and their written response practices were consistent with their beliefs. Teachers utilized different approaches to respond to student writing, but those approaches are consistent with current recommendations for responding to student writing. Three major themes emerged from the study. First, teachers must be given the opportunity to reflect about and articulate their beliefs about written response so they will know why they respond in the way they do. Second, teachers work within the boundaries of their specific writing program to organize their written responses to student writing. Third, teachers must respond to student writing from varying perspectives as readers of the text. The findings support studies which indicate that written response is a sociocultural practice and teacher beliefs are just one aspect of the complex nature of teacher written response. The study should add to the fields of response theory and the formation of teacher beliefs.

Beneath the Surface is a collection of seven individual literary nonfiction essays. Five of the essays are personal essays, and three come from the author's contribution to UNO's Katrina Narrative Project. The collection represents the author's cumulative body of work upon completion of her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at UNO. Titles include: "Beneath the Surface, " "Hello, Harry, " "My One-Summer Bike, " "Just Like Jazzfest, " In Defense of Sodom, " "'Every Year It's Something, '" and "Revising my Approach. The essays explore themes such as sibling bereavement, Latin American travel, the incomprehensibility of death, experiencing new cultures, online teaching, and hurricane evacuation.

The use of imitation exercises—writing activities employing model texts and the modeling of writing-process behaviors—in the First Year composition classroom can have many benefits for both student writers and teachers, and offers practical solutions to some of the problems facing student writers in today's colleges. First Year writing students are often unaware that they are part of a larger academic community. They often lack exposure to and understanding of academic standards. They don't understand that "good" writing is not a blanket-concept but is determined on a situational basis, and they are frustrated by the vaguely expressed expectations of their writing teachers. These problems are interconnected and so are all addressed in this study, but because they offer so many potential avenues for discussion, the focus of this project will be limited to the benefits of clear expectations that the use of modeling activities in the classroom can bring about for both students and teachers. An in-depth look at the materials, methods, and results of student participation in the activities of a single semester of English 1105, the first course in Virginia Tech's First Year Writing Program will be the dominant component of the project; it will be supplemented by a review of literature and a contextual discussion of what Stephen M. North calls the "Practitioner" mode of inquiry—the gathering of pedagogical information through the active classroom application of educational theories and practices. / Master of Arts