Since the early 1970s, the nature of written discourse as well as the writing process itself have attracted renewed interest from educational researchers, linguists, applied linguists, and teachers. In the United Kingdom, for example, researchers such as Britton observed young writers in the process of writing in order to identify the planning, decision making, and heuristics they employed. Complementary work in the United States by such researchers and educators as Emig, Murray, and Graves led to the emergence of the “process” school in writing theory and practice. This view emphasizes that writing is a recursive rather than a linear process, that writers rarely write to a preconceived plan or model, that the process of writing creates its own form and meaning, and that there is a significant degree of individual variation in the composing behaviors of both first and second language writers.

While the enthusiasm that this view of writing generated has led some of its advocates to propose yet another pedagogical orthodoxy – the process approach – much remains to be discovered about how second language writers write and learn to write, and about the kinds of writing instruction they are most likely to benefit from. It was this need that prompted the present book.

The contributors explore the major issues that have emerged from the past twenty years of research and practice, particularly in North America. These include the relationship between reading first language and second language writing, the relationship between reading and writing, approaches to feedback, the role of revision, assessment, and the role of the writing teacher.