Paul Kei Matsuda has written about the divide between US composition and applied linguistics, which he attributes to an institutionalization of the division of labour between applied linguistics and composition in the early 1960s. Therefore, when language concerns resurfaced in composition in the early 2000s, this division of labour led to a…

Students' engagement in writing mediates their academic literacy development as they become initiated and socialized into disciplinary communities. With a focus on the mediating role of writing, the present study investigates the ways in which two L2 students forge an early understanding of academic discourse when they carry out writing tasks…

While metadiscourse use has been well-attended in second language (L2) writing research, relatively less effort has been made in documenting changing patterns of metadiscourse use among L2 writers. The present study addressed this gap by probing a diachronic change of interactive metadiscourse in research articles published in "English…

In this exploratory study, we adopt corpus linguistic methods to quantify, contextualize and investigate race in translingual scholarship in US writing and rhetoric studies over the past decade. Results indicate that while race is mentioned minimally in the corpus, in instances where it is mentioned many scholars pay attention to…

Although fluency is an important subconstruct of language proficiency, it has not received as much attention in L2 writing research as complexity and accuracy have, in part due to the lack of methodological approaches for the analysis of large datasets of writing-process data. This article presents a method of time-aligned keystroke logging and…

As texts enact historically situated ways of making knowledge, intertextual analysis through citation patterns can shed some light on a community's epistemologies. The present research seeks a deeper understanding of the theoretical trends, the influences, and the emerging disciplinary configuration of the writing studies community in Latin…

Although the concept of contrastive rhetoric has received considerable attention in research on second language writing, it has not been adequately examined in a linguistically complex context such as Tunisia. This study is an attempt to contribute to the growing body of research on second language writing through investigating the validity of the…

What is the relationship, in US writing studies, between scholarship about writing and scholarship about language? What should it be? "Language" and "linguistics" in general have been othered; "internationalization" or "mondialisation" might serve as catalyst for exchange and collaboration and making…

This study investigated the cognitive processes underlying pauses at different textual locations (e.g., within/between words) and various levels of revision (e.g., below word/clause). We used stimulated recall, keystroke logging, and eye-tracking methodology in combination to examine pausing and revision behaviors. Thirty advanced Chinese L2 users…

Much research has been completed that focused on the role of drafting strategies in first language (L1) writing, but its role in second language (L2) writing is missing. The present study investigated the impact of outlining and free writing strategies on L2 academic writing in terms of overall quality, as well as more specifically in terms of…

This study contributes to L2 writing research which seeks to tie predictions of the Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan, 1998; Skehan & Foster, 2001) and Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2001, 2005, 2011a, 2011b) to models of working memory in L1 writing (Kellogg, 1996). The study uses a quasi-experimental research design to investigate…

Given complaints about preparation of international students for their writing-intensive courses, a director of first-year writing and an undergraduate researcher at a Midwestern research university conducted a needs assessment based on Kaufman's model. Instruments used included a survey, interviews, and analysis of commentary on sample papers.…

Lexical access and retrieval are essential processes in fluent and efficient second language (L2) oral and written productive uses of language. In the case of L2 writing, attention to vocabulary is of paramount importance, although the retrieval of relevant lexis while composing in an L2 frequently entails different degrees of problem-solving…