Welcome to JCRL Issue 51.1. This issue has been compiled by your new editorial team, comprising Sarah Felber, Deena Vaughn, and Mariko Carson. Sarah Felber continues in her role as Co-editor, and will be joined by Co-editor Deena Vaughn, who has been serving as Assistant Editor for the past three years. We are thrilled to welcome Mariko Carson to the role of Assistant Editor. Your new team looks forward to serving you by facilitating the publication of varied and exciting works in postsecondary literacy and learning.
As we move in to 2021, we hope we will all take some time to reflect on what the events of 2020 have meant for us. While it will undoubtedly take more time to fully realize the impact of this extraordinary year, we can already anticipate some of the lasting effects of living through a pandemic, of relying more than ever on technology to engage with the world, and of taking a broader, action-oriented view of justice and equity in our society.
At JCRL, 2020 was an anniversary year—our fiftieth volume, which we celebrated with four issues focused on linguistic and cultural diversity in postsecondary literacy and learning. We thank all of our authors, especially our invited guest contributors, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Sonya Armstrong, Asao Inoue, Rachele Lawton, and Christa de Kleine. Though our themed volume has concluded, expect to see continued attention to diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in JCRL.
In this issue, we present four feature articles, all examining different areas of postsecondary literacy and learning.
We open with “Assessing the Effectiveness of a Coaching Intervention for Students on Academic Probation,” by Sarah Vanacore and Thomas Dahan. In this article, the authors report of the efficacy of an academic coaching intervention for students placed on academic probation. This intervention offered students biweekly coaching aiming to increase their sense of belonging at the university and their self-efficacy. Finding that compliance with the academic coaching program produced a moderate to large effect on GPA, the authors suggest several implications for practice to make the most of such interventions.
Our next feature article is “Building a Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Model in University Reading Support Courses,” by Timothy Nelson and Mohammed Albakry. In this article, the authors describe a novel approach to teaching academic vocabulary using a tool that searches corpora and provides information on the frequency of lexical items, collocating items, and usage in context of searched corpora. They describe how instruction using the tool might proceed, providing examples using specific lexical items.
In our third feature article, “Trades-Based Literacy: Community College Faculty’s Exploration of Disciplinary Literacy,” Kristen Gregory and Thomas Bean investigate disciplinary literacy specific to the trades. In this case study, the authors solicit the help of four community college faculty to examine their respective disciplines from a sociocultural perspective. Based on the reporting from the participants in the study, the authors contend that intentional literacy practices lead to improved instructor support of students who can then move on to become insiders within their given fields.
We close this issue with “Multiplication Facts in the Continuum of Skills,” where authors Michele Poast, Susan Troncoso Skidmore, and Linda Reichwein Zientek examine the correlation between multiplication-factor automaticity for developmental mathematic students and subsequent success in Intermediate Algebra. The authors contend that increased rates of prerequisite multiplication-fact automaticity at the developmental math level can increase student success in Intermediate Algebra.
Thank you for your continued readership and support of JCRL. We are accepting submissions on an ongoing basis of both feature articles and forum articles. Please refer to the College Reading and Learning Association website for submission guidelines.