The College Writing Toolkit ─ Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing

Every writing teacher needs a toolkit of good lesson plans and inspiring assignments. The College Writing Toolkit is just such a resource, offering practical tools for both new and experienced teachers seeking to expand their professional repertoire. This book provides a collection of "tried and tested" methods and techniques for eliciting and working on students' writing in a college or university environment. Contributors from all over the world reflect on best practices for teaching writing and for generating writing assignments that help college or university students to learn and to express themselves with confidence, clarity, and originality and in a range of genres.

Each contribution is written in a format specifying the theoretical and conceptual framework of the pedagogical activity, its purpose, audience, and intended outcomes. Contributors also describe the situations in which the activity has been tried, what the results have been, and how the activity has been modified accordingly. An important aspect of the descriptions is the contributors' reflections on the value of the activity and their recommendations for applying it for best results in the same and different types of contexts, such as for different types of institutions and audiences of students. Those who incorporate the practices of The College Writing Toolkit in their own teaching can therefore benefit from another practitioner's understanding and experience gained from refining an activity over time to enhance its effectiveness.

Martha C. Pennington is Professor of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University and the editor of the journal Writing & Pedagogy. She is the author of The Computer and the Non-Native Writer (Hampton Press) and Writing in an Electronic Medium: Research with Language Learners (Athelstan). She has won awards for educational leadership from the UK as a National Teaching Fellow and from the TOEFL group of the Educational Testing Service (Princeton, New Jersey).
Pauline Burton is a Senior Lecturer at the Community College of City University, Hong Kong. She co-edited Bilingual Women: Anthropological Approaches to Second Language Use (Berg) and complements her academic profile with a background in creative writing, acting, and radio performance.