ABSTRACT
Not much of the published literature on junior and senior high school for L2 learners through the 1980s focused specifically on L2 writing. Rather, researchers were concerned primarily to suggest pedagogical possibilities (Freeman & Freeman, 1989) and explore issues related to bilingual education and teaching ESL through the content areas (Cantoni-Harvey, 1987; Chamot & O’Malley, 1987; Crandall, 1987; Rigg & Allen, 1989; Scarcella, 1990). Research from the early 1990s forward, however, has included a more direct focus on L2 writing development. Much of this research on L2 writing and writers in secondary schools has been qualitative in orientation, primarily involving observational and case studies of students and/or high schools, but also including questionnaire and interview research, some quantitative analyses of outcome data, and, especially abroad, investigations of pedagogical innovations. But in fact this adolescent population has generally suffered from a lack of attention to its writing needs in L2 (Harklau, 2000, 2001; Reynolds, 2001; Wald, 1987). Moreover, unlike the pervading optimistic tone of research on child or community L2 writers, the research literature on high school L2 students and their writing experiences paints a consistently pessimistic portrait of the overall predicament of high school L2 learners and writers. The qualitative focus of much of this research gives insight into the personal sadness, loneliness, stress, embarrassment at being placed into classes with younger domestic students, homesickness, and social isolation of many of these students. Most of the research has focused on students of Spanish-speaking, Asian, or Southeast Asian background; this distribution of interest probably more or less fairly represents the visible secondary school L2 student population in North America.
