Journal of Second Language Writing

12 (2003) 3–15

L2 writing in the post-process era: Introduction

Dwight Atkinson*
Graduate College of Education, Temple University Japan, 2-8-12 Minami Azabu,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0047, Japan

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue, I attempt to lay out a coherent if still-heuristic
notion of ‘‘post-process.’’ I do so by first investigating four components of Trimbur’s
(1994) definition of ‘‘post-process’’: the social; the post-cognitivist; literacy as an ideo-
logical arena; and composition as a cultural activity. Next, I review studies in first and
especially second language writing/literacy research which have attempted to move beyond
process pedagogy and theory, and which for me, at least, provide a sound conceptual basis
for further developments in that direction. I then conclude by stating my own summative
definition of post-process, and briefly introducing the main contributions to this special
issue.
# 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Process writing; Post-process; Post-modernism; Second language writing; Critical

applied linguistics

I first encountered the term ‘‘post-process’’ in John Trimbur’s 1994 review

essay, ‘‘Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process’’ (Trimbur, 1994).
There, Trimbur reviewed three books that:

enact[ed] what has come to be called the ‘‘social turn’’ . . ., a post-process, post-
cognitivist theory and pedagogy that represent literacy as an ideological arena
and composition as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposition
themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities, discourses,
practices, and institutions. (p. 109)

As a first approximation to the notion of ‘‘post-process’’ featured and debated

in this special issue, I would like to examine some of the main substantive terms in

*
Tel.: þ81-3-5441-9851; fax: 81-3-5441-9822.
E-mail address: dwightatki@aol.com (D. Atkinson).

1060-3743/03/$ – see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S1060-3743(02)00123-6
4 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15

Trimbur’s statement as they relate to current theory and practice in second

language writing: ‘‘social’’; ‘‘post-cognitivist’’; ‘‘literacy as an ideological
arena’’; and ‘‘composition as cultural activity.’’
Simplifying somewhat, the ‘‘social turn’’ mentioned by Trimbur was a response
throughout the humanities and social sciences to the austere asociality of
structuralism (e.g., Giddens, 1979; Rowe, 1995). Structuralists viewed human
behavior as substantially determined by closed, abstract, formalized systems of
oppositional elements, for example, phonetics and syntax in linguistics; kinship
and myth-based symbol systems in anthropology; and grid-like social-organiza-
tional structures in sociology. Reacting to this severely reductive approach to
understanding human beings, social scientists and humanists developed a number
of counter-frameworks and concepts in the second half of the 20th century:
interpretivist (e.g., Geertz, 1973); social constructionist (e.g., Berger & Luck-
mann, 1966); ethnomethodological (e.g., Garfinkel, 1967); sociolinguistic (e.g.,
Hymes, 1972); and poststructuralist (e.g., Derrida, 1976; Foucault, 1972). Such
approaches currently dominate much research in social science, humanities, and
education — L1 composition itself was just taking ‘‘the social turn’’ when
Trimbur wrote his piece.
The field of L2 writing, as well, has shown movement in this direction over the
past decade. Process writing, its strongest guiding force over the last part of the
20th century, was resolutely asocial in any theoretical sense, although not
especially structuralist.1 It saw the learner almost wholly individualistically,
1
There is obviously no monolithic entity or set of practices called ‘‘process pedagogy.’’ I therefore,
use the term advisedly and as a mid-level generalization (Gee, 1999). I also deal with this point to
some degree as regards L2 writing in the section of this introduction entitled ‘‘Post-process and the
Contributions to this Special Issue.’’
The claim that process writing has been the dominant approach to L2 writing in the last part of the
20th century will perhaps be contested by some (see, for example, Leki, 1992, pp. 6–7). Given the lack
of a well-documented history of L2 writing as an organized discipline, such claims are obviously
matters of interpretation, as well as of personal experience. I would point, however, to such influential
publications as Second Language Writing: Research Insights for the Classroom (Kroll, 1990), wherein
9 of the 13 chapters were centrally concerned with some aspect of the writing process, to suggest that
evidence for this claim is more than anecdotal. In one of these chapters, Johns (1990, p. 26) states:

The influence of the process approaches, especially of cognitive views, upon modern ESL
classrooms cannot be exaggerated. In most classrooms, ESL teachers prepare students to
write through invention and other prewriting activities . . ., encourage several drafts of a
paper, require paper revision at the macro levels, generally through group work . . ., and
delay the student fixation with and correction of sentence-level errors until the final editing
stage.

Likewise, more recent accounts of the development and current state of the field of L2 writing
foreground the importance and pervasiveness of the process movement in the last quarter of the 20th
century. Thus, Grabe and Kaplan (1996, p. 84) state that ‘‘[M]uch current research on writing in a L2 is
based directly on theoretical and instructional trends in writing-as-a-process theory.’’ Likewise, Ferris
and Hedgcock (1998, pp. 5–6) open the section of their first chapter entitled ‘‘The Emergence of L2
Writing as a Subdiscipline: Issues and Methods’’ with the statement:
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15 5

‘‘the’’ writing process as an abstract, internal process, and writing as a discovery-

type activity, wherein what was being discovered was often at least partly ‘‘the
self’’ (e.g., Kent, 1999; Tobin, 1994). The teaching practices that followed from
the theory were also often similarly focused on developing the inner self, although
of course in some abstract (and often vaguely conceptualized) relationship with
the social environment. Interest in such notions as genre and discourse community
(e.g., Swales, 1990), studies of writers operating in particular academic contexts
(e.g., Leki, 1995; Leki & Carson, 1997), and theoretical discussions of social
constructionism and the like (e.g., Johns, 1990) have all taken us some way toward
developing a view of L2 writing as a socially situated activity. At the same time, in
comparison to some of the ‘‘social-turn’’ orientations mentioned in the previous
paragraph, it seems to me that L2 writing could go substantially further in this
regard (for suggestive research, see e.g., Hyland, this volume; Pennycook, 1996;
Prior, 1998, 2001; Swales, 1993).2
‘‘Post-cognitivist’’ in Trimbur’s statement alludes to critiques of the cogni-
tivist school of process-writing research, centered in the work of Linda Flower
and John Hayes at Carnegie-Mellon University (e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1981).
Patricia Bizzell, one of the writers Trimbur reviewed in his essay, was among the
first to note that this approach neglected the whole domain of social conven-
tionality — the highly complex, socially constructed, but taken-for-granted

Based on presumed and observed similarities between L1 and L2 composing processes,

practitioners of ESL writing instruction in the early 1980s largely imitated L1 classroom
practices in their own classrooms . . .. Not only did research in L1 composition and rhetoric
provide sound theoretical underpinnings for L2 composing pedagogy, but emergent L2
writing research also began to show that ESL writers . . . demonstrate strategies and skills
quite similar to those displayed by native English-speaking (NES) writers.

Although Ferris and Hedgcock’s is primarily a historical account at this point, it is clearly meant to
suggest that process pedagogy still has enormous influence in the current ‘‘state of the art’’ in L2
writing. This fact can also be seen in both of these scholars’ other work in the field, which concentrates
largely on issues of process — e.g., student and teacher feedback (Ferris, 1995a, 1997; Ferris, Pezone,
Tade, & Tinti, 1997; Hedgcock & Leftkowitz, 1992, 1994, 1996) and self-editing (Ferris, 1995b).
2
To give two examples of areas in which socially oriented theories of L2 writing could go
substantially further in the directions charted by ‘‘social turn’’ theorists:
1. The notion of ‘‘coherence’’ — which still seems to operate in at least some L2 writing
research (e.g., Connor, 1996) — is to me at least as unfortunate for what it hides or subsumes
about the relations between texts and the world as for what it allows or reveals. In fact, another
way of looking at what I am calling the ‘‘post-process’’ era in L2 writing would be to think of
it as an unpacking and reconceptualization of the ‘‘coherence’’ concept — in attempting to
answer the question: How exactly does a particular text (or set of texts, or set of text-producing
writing practices, or text-producing author(s), etc.) connect up with the rest of the world?
2. A second area in which progress might be made in socially oriented L2 writing is in
reconceptualizing the social/cognitive binary that seems to have inhibited basically all thought
on language and its development since the advent of cognitive psychology in the 1960s (and
no doubt behaviorism before that). Although this subject is beyond the scope of the present
essay, I treat it more fully elsewhere (Atkinson, 2002; cf., Leki, 2002).
6 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15

patterning of communication by which all human social groups enact efficient,

solidarity-maintaining social action (Bizzell, 1982; cf., Atkinson, 1991). But
‘‘post-cognitivist’’ can also be taken in a wider sense, as rejecting a whole
complex of assumptions at the core of the cognitive revolution in psychology,
and, beyond that, of modernist worldviews in general — for example, inviolate
individuality; ‘‘lonely,’’ autonomous cognition; and largely invariant cognitive
processes by which humans operate in the world. To this point, I have seen few
serious questionings of these tenets in L2 writing (for a possible opening,
however, see Leki, 2002; see also Atkinson, 2002, for second language acquisi-
tion in general).
‘‘Literacy as an ideological arena’’ refers to a growing understanding over the
past two decades that reading and writing are not the decontextualized, informa-
tion-centered, impersonal activities they were once thought to be, but rather that
they actively construct, and are centrally implicated within, power relations,
society, culture, and, indeed, individuality itself. It may even be a mistake,
according to some theorists (e.g., Gee, 1996; cf., Foucault, 1972), to regard reading
and writing as the main locus of literacy: These social activities may be so bound up
in other forms of doing, being, and knowing that they are not in any ecologically
valid way separable from them. The ideological nature of literacy emerges in L2
writing research and practice when we realize that, for example: (1) what we are
teaching and researching is often ‘‘powerful literacy’’ (Gee, 1996), with a strong
basis in quite particular (and quite restricted) social practices (e.g., Belcher, 1997,
2001; Pennycook, 1996); and (2) who we are teaching are often the already-
powerful and socioeconomically privileged (Vandrick, 1995; cf., Bourdieu, 1977).
‘‘Composition as cultural activity’’ captures elements of what I have written so
far, focusing especially on the restricted — and powerful — uses of literacy that
have dominated ‘‘western’’ social institutions over the past several centuries (e.g.,
Atkinson, 1997, 1999; Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995; Luke, 1996; Ohmann, 1982;
Scollon, 1995), and which increasingly and aggressively seem to be recolonizing
the world (Crystal, 1997; Swales, 1990). What do notions like ‘‘voice,’’ ‘‘critical
thinking,’’ ‘‘originality,’’ ‘‘clarity,’’ and ‘‘plagiarism’’ mean outside the cultural
contexts in which they have been developed and are so deeply embedded?3 At the
level of teaching, for example, how do the student-centered, process-oriented, and
fluency-focused elements of process pedagogy impact students from educational
backgrounds that are teacher-centered, knowledge-oriented, and accuracy-
focused? Or, to stretch Trimbur’s phrase a bit further, what does it even mean
to talk about ‘‘culture,’’ and its purported influence on students writing in a second/
additional language (e.g., Atkinson, 1999; Kubota, 1999; Spack, 1997)?
Although none of the questions raised here or the topics introduced can be
definitively addressed in a few articles — nor can the term ‘‘post-process’’ be
perfectly defined — I have at least tried to briefly sketch the field of endeavor as I

3
Consider, for instance, the important place recently given ‘‘critical thinking’’ in national second
language education policy in places like Malaysia and Hong Kong (e.g., Hashim & Abas, 2000).
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15 7

see it. Let me now return to Trimbur’s own explication of the ‘‘post-process’’
notion, followed by a brief review of related literature in the field.

Conceptual background

By Trimbur’s account, the ‘‘social turn’’ theorists, led by Patricia Bizzell

(1992), had good reason to critique process pedagogy. Here is Trimbur’s summary
of their critique:

[These scholars’ rejection of process pedagogy] result[ed] from a crisis within

the process paradigm and a growing disillusion with its limits and pressures . . ..
[T]he distinction between product and process, which initially seemed so
clarifying, not only proved conceptually inadequate to what writers do when
they are writing, it also made writing instruction seem easier than it is. As Bizzell
notes, by polarizing ‘‘individual creative talents’’ and ‘‘the oppressive institu-
tion’’ of schooling, the process movement led teachers to believe that they could
simply step outside the institutions and discourses of schooling in order to release
an authentic language from their students. (pp. 109–110)

By defining a teacher’s role as that of a facilitator or co-learner or collaborator,

process teachers attempted to relinquish authority unproblematically, in order to
empower the expressive capacities of their students. These teachers, however, ran
into some very real problems. For one thing, students often reinscribed the
authority that process teachers were trying to vacate, for the very simple reason
that they knew their composition processes would eventually result in a product
for evaluation, and the canniest among them recognized that sincerity and
authenticity of voice were the privileged means of symbolic exchange . . .. If
process teachers were reading what they took to be direct and unmediated prose
of personal experience, the most successful students were hard at work con-
structing the authorial persona of self-revelatory personal essays written in a
decidedly non-academic style. To put it another way, the irony of the process
pedagogy is that teachers’ desire to operate outside oppressive institutions and
avoid the errors of the past only reinstituted the rhetoric of the belletristic
tradition at the center of the writing classroom.

For Trimbur and the scholars whose work he reviewed, then, problems with
process pedagogy revolved around its ultimate failure to deal with questions of
power in the classroom: The bad old ways basically continued.

While Trimbur was (for me at least) the first to put a name to it, by the mid-
1990s a critique of process pedagogy was in the air, its seeds having been sown by
teachers and researchers such as Delpit (1988) and Inghilleri (1989) in the
preceding decade.4 These two scholars had pointed out that process pedagogy
4
In his article in this issue, Paul Matsuda traces a somewhat different evolutionary path for the
‘‘post-process’’ movement — one that is centered more fully in the field of L1 composition itself.
8 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15

was problematic for African American and immigrant ESL students, respectively,
because the indirect, inductive approach taken by process-oriented teachers
seemed to assume forms of socialization these students had neither had in their
home environments nor were likely to get in the classroom. As with Trimbur, their
criticisms therefore revolved ultimately around such questions as ‘‘Whose
power?’’ and ‘‘Who benefits?’’ in the process-oriented classroom.5
By the 1990s, a growing number of researchers and teachers were beginning to
point out the mismatch between L1-oriented process pedagogy and the life
experiences of various kinds of students. Scollon (1991; see also Ho, 1998; Li,
1996; Shen, 1989), for example, described his attempt to implement Elbow’s
version of process writing (e.g., Elbow, 1981) in a class of Taiwanese university
students, with strikingly poor results. He located the problem in clashing expecta-
tions regarding what sociocultural action student writers saw themselves as
engaged in, including how to position themselves vis-à-vis the larger society
and its fund of received knowledge. Somewhat similarly, Holliday (1994) argued
that, without considerable sensitivity and modification, process-oriented, group-
based, student-centered approaches to second language teaching in general were
inappropriately applied in parts of the world they were not originally designed for.
Allaei & Connor (1990), Carson and Nelson (1996), Delpit (1995), Gee (1990,
1996), and Ramanathan and Kaplan (1996), among others, also indicated ways in
which non-mainstream writers might be disadvantaged by an L1-oriented process
writing approach. Unlike Trimbur or Scollon, however, some of these latter
scholars focused more on mundane classroom realities — specific classroom
practices that did not seem to work as expected — than on abstract (but no less real)
issues of culture and power.
In an important historical account of school-based literacy education in ‘‘the
west,’’ Kalantzis and Cope (1993) described the dominant influence of ‘‘pro-
gressivism’’ on modern educational contexts. Progressivism by their account
originated in response to traditional pedagogical approaches which emphasized
the inculcation of received knowledge — typically manifested in a culture-centric
and invariant canon of ‘‘classical’’ works to be fixed in the student’s mind. In
attempting to overturn such approaches, the originator of progressivism, John
Dewey, advocated a ‘‘pedagogy of experience’’ in which students’ individuality
and autonomy were developed by giving them the opportunity to learn according
to their own needs and interests. It is out of this tradition that student-centered,
process-oriented, and discovery-based curricular innovations such as process
writing and whole language emerged, according to Kalantzis and Cope.
More specifically, Kalantzis and Cope delineated two types of progressivism: one
based directly on the ideas of Dewey, which came to influence curriculum especially
in the US from the 1960s onward; and one which has increasingly combined parts of
Deweyan progressivism with post-modernist and non-foundational accounts of

5
These two questions were first given their exact forms of expression for me by Lars Molloy, who
attributed them to V. I. Lenin.
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15 9

schooling and power (e.g., Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991). Regarding both post-
modernist progressivism (as its most recent manifestation) and progressivism in
general, Kalantzis and Cope raised a number of critical questions:
1. Does post-modernist progressivism, with its apparent radical openness to
individuality and difference, really value all cultural points of view
equally (e.g., those which ‘‘revere textual authority or which elevate
teachers as the sources of educational knowledge’’ (pp. 56–57))?
2. Is a ‘‘student-centered’’ approach not in reality a cultural artifact, and one
which obscures rather than clarifies the continued control of education/
knowledge by the teacher and the school?
3. Does the ‘‘cultural bias’’ of progressivist pedagogy favor certain socio-
cultural groups at the expense of others, that is, those whose school-like
literacy socialization began at birth versus those who come from very
different traditions of literacy and language use (e.g., Heath, 1983)?
4. Related to Point 3, does the ‘‘assumption that all students will intuitively
discover things for themselves’’ (p. 57) unfairly reproduce a system in
which those who receive the tools to do so in early socialization are
advantaged over those who don’t?
In sum, Kalantzis and Cope were concerned in their historical account with the
cultural assumptions underlying progressivism, and the disabling effects such
assumptions could have on non-mainstream students. The solution they offer to
these problems — and the main focus of the book in which their essay appears —
is the originally Australian ‘‘genre approach’’ to teaching writing, represented in
this special issue by Hyland’s article (see below).
I have now covered a range of different historical objections to process
approaches to writing. For the sake of convenience, these can be classified as
follows:
1. Concerns about the production and reproduction of unequal power
relationships in and beyond the classroom, based largely on the non-
transparent nature of pedagogies which seek to provide alternatives to top-
down, teacher-centered approaches.
2. Concerns about cultural mismatches — and their ultimate effects (as in
Point 1 just above) — having to do with the highly specific cultural basis
of process pedagogies.
3. More microscopic concerns having to do with techniques and procedures
connected with process writing (e.g., peer review), and their possible lack
of utility in the process-writing classroom.

‘‘Post-process’’ and the contributions to this special issue

Historical concerns about process pedagogy, however, need not bind us to any
particular interpretation of the term ‘‘post-process.’’ In the long run, its value may
10 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15

lie more in its prospective and heuristic power — its ability to take us beyond a
focus on writing simply as a process, or more specifically as a highly cognitive,
individualist, largely asocial process. Seen through a different lens, writing is a
human activity which reaches into all other areas of human endeavor — expansive
in a way that casts doubt on conventional boundaries between individual and
society, language and action, the cognitive and the social. I therefore view the
notion of ‘‘post-process’’ as an appropriate basis on which to investigate the
complex activity of L2 writing in its full range of sociocognitive situatedness,
dynamism, diversity, and implications.
For the purposes of this special issue, then, I would like to define ‘‘post-
process’’ as including everything that follows, historically speaking, the period of
L2 writing instruction and research that focused primarily on writing as a
cognitive or internal, multi-staged process, and in which by far the major dynamic
of learning was through doing, with the teacher taking (in some — sometimes
imagined — senses) a background role. However, let me immediately consider
two kinds of potential problems with this definition.
First, it might justifiably be objected that the version of process pedagogy
assumed here bears little resemblance to those commonly employed in L2 writing
classrooms. Certainly, in my own experience as an L2 writing teacher, I have
played a substantial, interventionist role in students’ writing processes, offering
comments and encouragement designed to mold students’ writings in definite
ways (for more on this approach, see Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995). Likewise,
in most of the process-oriented writing classes I have taught, students addressed
particular assignments, there being little in the way of free choice of essay topics
(as a result, I should add, largely of the specific curriculum being followed).
Similarly, I have rarely encouraged self-discovery as the primary purpose of
writing assignments; quite to the contrary, these assignments typically asked
students to write ‘‘about something’’ — some social issue or concern beyond their
purely personal, individual lives. In these regards, I believe my experience reflects
those of many teachers of L2 writing.
And yet it seems equally apparent that process-oriented L2 writing instruction
does continue traditions that are part and parcel of the process pedagogy critiqued
by Trimbur, Scollon, Kalantzis, Cope, and the other scholars mentioned so far. In
fact, the greater number of these scholars have focused specifically on pedago-
gical concepts and practices current in L2 writing, including peer review, voice,
audience, and expression of self. To cite just one further example, the recent JSLW
special issue on voice (Belcher & Hirvela, 2001) included three articles featuring
what are to me, at any rate, notions of voice in L2 writing that are to some degree
at least individualistic and ‘‘originary’’ — notions which have been deconstructed
both in the same issue (Atkinson, 2001) and elsewhere (e.g., Bowden, 1999;
Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999).
Second, by advocating a ‘‘post-process’’ approach to L2 writing, I do not intend
to suggest that process pedagogy should necessarily be replaced in any wholesale
way in the L2 writing classroom. The usefulness and power of process writing has
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15 11

been revealed time and again; and if I were suddenly transported into and put in
charge of an L2 writing classroom, pre-writing, drafting, feedback, and revising
would almost certainly be important classroom activities. As an approach to
teaching different kinds of writing at the university level, I personally hold
process writing in high regard — it is, in fact, difficult for me to conceptualize the
effective teaching of writing without it. My own interest in the concept of ‘‘post-
process’’ is, therefore, not in terms of a basic ‘‘paradigm shift,’’ but rather in
expanding and broadening the domain of L2 writing — in research as much as in
teaching.
Let me turn now to the articles in this special issue. Of the authors whose work
is featured here, Ryuko Kubota, Christine Casanave, Ilona Leki, and myself were
participants in a colloquium entitled ‘‘Second Language Writing in the Post-
Process Era,’’ held at the 35th annual TESOL convention in St. Louis, Missouri in
March 2001. Ken Hyland and Paul Kei Matsuda were attendees at that collo-
quium, and raised issues related to those they write about here. Each of the six
authors clearly has their own thoughts on the place of process pedagogy in L2
writing research and teaching — perspectives that differ more or less widely from
the one I adopt in this introduction.
In his article, Ken Hyland describes the conceptual basis of the main insti-
tutionalized alternative to process pedagogy currently on offer: the ‘‘genre
approach’’ advocated principally by a group of scholars in Australia (e.g., Cope
& Kalantzis, 1993), but which is now spreading in influence beyond that context.
Hyland shows how this approach both opposes process pedagogy as he con-
ceptualizes it, and goes beyond it.
Ryuko Kubota delineates many of the connections that need to be made
between L2 writing and issues of race, class, and gender. Generally speaking,
Kubota advocates a non-essentialist approach to understanding these social
categories which highlights issues of power and discourse. This is a very different
perspective on L2 writing than the (superficially) non-political one that has
dominated the field historically, and it has already led to new and profound
understandings. Here, once again, L2 writing is being examined in its myriad
connections to the rest of the world, as opposed to being isolated in a narrow and
pragmatically conceived context.
Chris Casanave provides a review of case studies of second language writers,
arguing that they are especially useful in revealing the social and political
processes at work in such writing in the academic world. Although by no means
rejecting process pedagogy, Casanave sees writing processes as expansive and
closely interconnected to the rest of human activity.
In my own contribution to this special issue, I attempt to sketch out ways of
thinking about culture in L2 writing that deviate substantially from those
traditionally available in the field. In particular, I focus on recent attempts in
anthropology and cultural studies to examine culture reflexively — to investigate
how the analyst’s own unexamined perceptions color the viewing lens, including
what it means to think of writing instruction as a highly cultural activity.
12 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15

Paul Kei Matsuda’s paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of

having potential buzzwords like ‘‘post-process’’ in L1 and L2 writing studies,
arguing against the promotion of competing paradigms on the basis of such
notions. Matsuda’s paper was written substantially in response to my own
introduction to this special issue, and provides a welcome counterweight to
some of the statements and claims I put forward there.
Finally, as in the TESOL conference colloquium in which this special issue got
its start, Ilona Leki plays the twin role of summarizer and commentator. Despite
her reluctance as co-editor of JSLW to contribute to this special issue, I have
included her comments as a summative coda. Leki’s consideration of the possi-
bilities these contributions offer for a broader and more fully contextualized L2
writing studies seems to me to be an important one, given her unique perspective in
our field as teacher, researcher, program administrator, and journal editor.
In closing, I would like to restate the aim of this special issue. By calling the
current era of L2 writing ‘‘post-process,’’ we seek to highlight the rich, multifocal
nature of the field — our need and ability, in our current and future work, to go
beyond now-traditional views of L2 writing research and teaching which focus on
issues such as drafting, teacher feedback, peer review, editing, grammar correction,
and the like. We want in this special issue to emphasize the broad scope and nature of
the field — the manifold links that can be made between L2 writing and current and
emerging areas of local, global, political, intellectual, technological, and socio-
cognitive concern that are part of the landscape of theory and practice in education,
applied linguistics, and social science at the start of the 21st century. To that end, the
words of Gee (1990, p. 68) provide a fitting challenge to the field at large:

The English teacher can cooperate in her own marginalization by seeing herself
as a ‘‘language teacher’’ [and, I would add, more specifically ‘‘as a writing
teacher’’ — editor’s note] with no connection to . . . social and political issues. Or
she can . . . accept her role as one who socializes students into a world view that,
given its power [in the U.S.] and abroad, must be viewed critically, compara-
tively, and with a constant sense of the possibilities for change. Like it or not, the
English teacher stands at the very heart of the most crucial educational, cultural,
and political issues of our time.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Paul Kei Matsuda for helpful comments and criticisms on
an earlier draft of this paper.

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 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 3–15 13

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