ABSTRACT
The bulk of research on L2 writing has explored the undergraduate context in North America and worldwide. Most curricular decisions and innovations, most examination of texts, most exploration of writing strategies and difficulties have been directed at this population, who often studied and worked in the same institutions as the researchers themselves. As the nature of this population has shifted over the years, so has the focus of research attention in terms of language and cultural background, gender, residence status (visa-holding international students versus immigrant or second generation or “Generation 1.5”), and academic status (beginning with undergraduates and more recently moving toward graduate students). The undergraduate students researched in North American universities came from a variety of writing backgrounds: some from nonEnglish-medium settings, often abroad; others from U.S. high schools where they may or may not have had special ESL classes, where they may or may not have done much writing either in ESL classes or in other content area classes, where they may or may not have begun to (or wanted to) acculturate to U.S. teenage life and make English speaking friends; still others from intensive English programs, usually preuniversity institutions in an English-dominant country, that typically included academic writing instruction (Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995). Questions about appropriate academic support for these students’ L2 advanced literacy development included whether they could best be served by developmental or basic writing courses (Matsuda, 2003a) and whether they should take the firstyear writing course required in most U.S. settings with English-dominant students or in separate classes for L2 students (Silva, 1994). While a great deal of research has been published about these undergraduates, documenting their preferences and performance in the L2 writing classrooms and beyond, in recent years the students’ broader, more contextualized experiences in L2 writing classes have undergone scrutiny and increasingly the students themselves been heard from systematically through interview research (Leki, 2001b).
