ABSTRACT
The writing models that have illuminated writing research and the teaching of writing in the past 30 years were inspired by the pioneering intuition that writing is a cognitive process (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Kellogg, 1996). Undeniably, writing—the production of written language—is cognitive in many respects, with a variety of processes contributing: existing or created representations of knowledge, mental imagery, visual cognition, memory, attention, planning, and a monitoring system to orchestrate all these processes. Nevertheless, a full understanding of writing, including its difficulties and disorders, must consider in detail the language processes and language mechanisms underlying the generation, formulation, and production of written text to communicate thoughts. More explicit integration of language into the cognitive writing models will (a) contribute to explaining how writing skill develops, because a large part of writing development involves the growing ability of translating ideas into linguistic representations (Chenoweth & Hayes, 2001; Dockrell, Lindsay, & Connelly, 2009; Fayol, Alamargot, & Berninger, 2011); and (b) account for a broad class of errors in writing due to problems in choosing words; encoding and selecting syntactic and grammatical structures; and programming words, phrases, and sentences, which result in dysfluencies and disruptions (Arfé, Dockrell, & Berninger, in press). Other chapters in this volume make the case that writing models need to incorporate language variables (see Chapters 9, 10, and 11, this volume; see also Alves’ Vision, “The Future Is Bright for Writing Research,” this volume, which discusses the need, pointed out by Alamargot & Fayol, 2009, to integrate more meaningfully cognitive and psycholinguistic traditions in writing).
