Writing and Rhetoric Studies

This “essay” (article) is a close and critical look at The 2010 Citizens Clean Elections Voter Education Guide, a document made available to the Arizona public prior to the 2010 state General elections. Though the guide is described as “a nonpartisan, plain-language handbook” by its authors, it can be implicated in the production and reproduction of a discursive process that further constructs a degraded notion of both undocumented individuals and immigration. Many of the politicians that published statements in the guide continually associate undocumented immigrants and immigration with both the use of firearms and with crime in general. Additionally, I find that the majority of politicians in this document perpetuate this demeaning, violent, and inaccurate discourse for personal political gain. In conclusion, I argue for the expanded role of education concerning the effects of discursive forces in the United States.

Top-down" classroom power structures hinder active learning engagement and reify societal inequality. Seeking to avoid such a structure, a dialogic pedagogy is beholden to its students because it relies on their input to meet educational objectives. Though renouncing instructor primacy can be uncomfortable, interacting with students as agentive makers of knowledge not only fosters self-driven and critical learners but helps to resist the subordination of one group over another as well.

This “essay” (article) is a close and critical look at The 2010 Citizens Clean Elections Voter Education Guide, a document made available to the Arizona public prior to the 2010 state General elections. Though the guide is described as “a nonpartisan, plain-language handbook” by its authors, it can be implicated in the production and reproduction of a discursive process that further constructs a degraded notion of both undocumented individuals and immigration. Many of the politicians that published statements in the guide continually associate undocumented immigrants and immigration with both the use of firearms and with crime in general. Additionally, I find that the majority of politicians in this document perpetuate this demeaning, violent, and inaccurate discourse for personal political gain. In conclusion, I argue for the expanded role of education concerning the effects of discursive forces in the United States.

College writing education is transforming on a global scale, and U.S. community colleges (CCs) are an important part of that transformation. Whereas international students traditionally have matriculated at four-year universities, increasing populations of international students are now choosing to enter higher education through alternative routes made possible by CCs, and populations overall are predicted to grow (Altbach, Reisberg, & Rumbley, 2009, p. 7). A community college education has important implications specific to South Koreans. Although English is a required course in Korean public schools, many Korean families pay significant sums of money for their children to attend extracurricular education focusing on English learning or preparation for English proficiency exams, such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL®). Consequently, students from lower-income backgrounds have fewer opportunities to develop English fluency and therefore, fewer opportunities to enter and be successful at U.S. universities, many of which require the TOEFL® for admission.

For most of the World Wide Web's history, Web developers and users have been restricted to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) to create and access websites by title/Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Over roughly the last fifteen years, an international group of hardware and software experts, coordinated in part by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has created a workaround that allows for top-level Web domain names to be writable and readable in character sets other than ASCII, including Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Greek. But rather than prompting a discrete switch from one dominant language (English) to many, this development has prompted increasing linguistic complexity as internationalized sites include both English and more regional/local languages to fulfill rhetorical purposes. This article extends earlier research on Web internationalization and multilingualism by focusing on South Korea, which is simultaneously highly Internet connected and highly monolingual. Genre and linguistic analysis of three websites in Korean domains reveals language contact across "content" and "functional" areas in website layouts. Analysis suggests ongoing work across computing devices as well as research using diverse methodologies.

Drawing on findings from a national survey of TYCA members about how and why they access published scholarship, this article makes recommendations for fostering local teacher-scholar communities of practice within two-year college English departments. T his article emerged from our work as editors of Teaching Composition in the Two-Year College, a new addition to Bedford/St. Martin's Background Readings series for college English teachers. Our collection is the first volume in the series to compile key academic scholarship specifically for two-year college composition instructors, and it features readings that examine the unique complexities, challenges, and opportunities of teaching writing at open admissions institutions. From the outset, we wanted our colleagues at two-year colleges to help shape the collection's scope and character. To achieve this end, we conducted a national survey of Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) members. The survey posed a variety of questions—both multiple choice and open response—about how faculty find and use published scholarship (see the Appendix). The response rate was modest: 175 (9.7%) of the 1,775 TYCA-affiliated National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) members we contacted answered the survey. Thus, our findings are not generalizable to the entire TYCA membership, or to the broader population of two-year college English instructors nationwide. Nonetheless, those who did respond constitute an important subset of professionally engaged two-year college faculty, and their answers offer rich insight into how scholarship shapes their teaching, administrative practices, and professional identities. To our knowledge, this is the first survey ever conducted about the use of academic scholarship among two-year college English faculty—an important group of educators who teach roughly half of all composition classes nationwide—and we therefore approached this research with multiple goals. Our most immediate objective was to identify scholarship that TYCA members found useful to their work as teachers, administrators, and professionals for possible inclusion in our Bedford collection. However, we also saw the survey as an opportunity to gather

Research Problem: Recent research suggests that the standardized tests used for writing placement at a majority of open admissions community colleges may be systematically under-placing students in ways that undermine their likelihood of persistence and degree completion. These tests may have particularly negative consequences for students from some structurally disadvantaged groups. Directed Self-Placement (DSP) has been touted as a more socially just approach to writing placement, but to date there has been little published research on the consequences of DSP in community college settings. Research Questions: What are the motivations of community colleges that adopt DSP? What have been the consequences of adopting DSP at these community colleges? What are the consequences of DSP for different groups of students at community colleges? Literature Review: I ground this study in an examination of the social justice issues surrounding writing placement at open admissions community colleges and the various social justice-related arguments made for and against DSP. I also synthesize the available literature on how DSP affects different groups of students. Methodology: I reviewed the scholarly literature, searched the archives of professional listservs, and used listservs and professional email lists to identify community colleges that have implemented DSP. I then conducted semi-structured interviews with faculty and administrators at twelve two-year colleges that either have imple