With genre now viewed as a fundamental element of writing, both second language writing and mainstream composition studies have seen an increased focus on the question of how writers learn genres. The purpose of this paper is to review key findings from 60 empirical studies that have investigated this question. To this point, research has…

Recent research has come a long way in describing the linguistic features of large samples of written texts, although a satisfactory description of L2 writing remains problematic. Even when variables such as proficiency, language background, topic, and audience have been controlled, straightforward predictive relationships between linguistic…