This textbook is meant for first year English Composition Courses. The text covers the essentials of composition and rhetoric in a recursive manner and introduces research skills.

When you are eager to get started on the coursework in your major that will prepare you for your career, getting excited about an introductory college writing course can be difficult. However, regardless of your field of study, honing your writing skills—and your reading and critical-thinking skills—gives you a more solid academic foundation.

In college, academic expectations change from what you may have experienced in high school. The quantity of work you are expected to do is increased. When instructors expect you to read pages upon pages or study hours and hours for one particular course, managing your work load can be challenging.

The quality of the work you do also changes. It is not enough to understand course material and summarize it on an exam. You will also be expected to seriously engage with new ideas by reflecting on them, analyzing them, critiquing them, making connections, drawing conclusions, or finding new ways of thinking about a given subject. Educationally, you are moving into deeper waters. A good introductory writing course will help you swim.

This is a Composition I course that can be modified for ALP use.All materials have been created by Dianne Traynor and uploaded by Joanna Gray.

This collection of resources covers the fundamentals of literature and encourages critical and thoughtful responses to a variety of writings, from short stories, poetry, and music to case studies and academic essays. There is a comprehensive guide to the basic building blocks of writing, with terms, discussion points, video examples, and pop-culture relevancy. A link to each writing is included, with works ranging from Sophocles to Bono. 

Remixed OER textbook for an introductory Composition II course. Includes a list of themed readings on technology, as well as suggested assignment templates.

This course incorporates original OER materials with readings from the novel The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, a gripping and compassionate account of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War and readings from the textbook Composition II from Lumen Learning. The course will challenge students in their reading and writing skills while providing them with a historical and cultural context to better understand war, peace, and the human condition.

Remixed OER textbook for an introductory Composition I course. Includes a list of themed readings on mental health, as well as suggested assignment templates.

This workbook is designed for college-level freshman composition courses. It includes units and assignments on reflective writing, punctuation and mechanics, sentence combining, MLA and APA documentation style, the writing process, and research writing.

English Composition I
Covers a range of rhetorical situations and genres of writing, centering on argument. Students learn to read and analyze others’ writing and then respond with their own views, showing an awareness of their purpose and audience. The class culminates in a short argumentative research paper.

English Composition II
Focuses on scholarly investigation and the proper use of sources and documentation. Major emphasis is on writing research papers that are acceptable by APA standards.

This guide provides clear grammatical definitions, and unpacks the features of compound sentences and how they function. The guide also offers, as a starting point, some strategies for implementing sentence-level instruction in your classroom. And yes, compound sentences need to be taught in both primary and secondary classes!

Concise Constructs is the perfect composition textbook for college ESL students. This book was designed by students for students! Its easy to understand vocabulary, informal tone, and concise nature will ensure students actually read the book and learn from the content. Additionally, this textbook is accompanied by a complete curriculum guide with resources for educators.

My curriculum unit, “Consider the Source: Research Skills for Cell Phone Libraries”, is a unit designed for a fifth-grade regular education English Language Arts class. A common core standard in ELA-writing is to complete a research writing piece that uses three references to support their findings. Many schools are not equipped to provide three sources for each student to use. Either the school library is not properly shelved or there is a lack of chrome books for every student in middle school to have access to on-line resources. It has provided a climate of uncertainty. One option would be to have students research their topics at home. Though their public library card may be invalid, most middle school students own a cell phone. The unit consists of skills to teach students how to use their cell phones for research purposes. By revamping traditional research tools, I hope it will provide a renewed love of investigative research and an enthusiasm to complete writing assignments.

About the Arts, Care & Connection Lesson Collection: Arts for Learning Northwest collaborated with Oregon teaching artists on this collection of arts integration modules designed for K-5 students, with integrated social emotional learning content in the areas of dance, visual arts, theater, and music.

In this context rich problem, students are asked to analyze the effects of a price ceiling.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in a conversation with host Harry Kreisler, looks back and reflects on the art of writing, U.S. policy toward the Third World during the Cold War, political leadership, and on his intellectual contributions. (51 min)

This assignment engages students in an environmental history class in the use of quantitative data, and raises questions about the nature and meaning of that data, and how it might be utilized.

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Course map for class that teaches first-year students core rhetorical concepts (ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos) by analyzing Taylor Swift’s songs, videos, interviews, and social media posts. Includes learning objectives, assignments, formative feedback, activities, and readings or other resources for a 10-week course and final project.

This course shell, available in Canvas, is designed to instruct current or aspiring writing tutors on the theory and practice of peer-tutoring. The course includes a link to an open access Tutor Handbook, readings in theory and practice, and assignments that simulate peer tutoring sessions.

This course covers approaches to research and evaluation in the planning field, for those preparing to write 1st-year doctoral and other research papers. Topics include narrowing down research interests, using quantitative and qualitative techniques complementarily, and interviewing and other fieldwork challenges. The course uses a seminar-type format in which readings, class discussions, and assignments are built around (1) generic themes that run across the research interests and paper topics of students in the class, and (2) lessons about methodology to be learned from the case comparison studies assigned.

Reading and creating comic strips and comic books are engaging ways to promote literacy at any grade level and across content areas. The students in this video are members of a high school comic book club and have access to drawing tablets and Adobe Photoshop, so they can achieve sophisticated results. Even without such software, however, teachers can still integrate digital comics into a wide range of teaching situations.

There are a number of comic books, especially contemporary ones, that are not “school appropriate,” so you might want to guide students’ web research on comic books.