The challenge of academic writing for Chinese students within ...

attend not only to his or her own thoughts, but also to the content and style
conventions of the community for whom the piece is being written.
This complex process of academic writing becomes more convoluted for L2 writers
since they conduct the writing in a second language, and they are unfamiliar with
academic conventions, and expectations of academic writing in UK HE (Ballard &
Clanchy, 1997).
The last four decades have seen the development of L2 writing research from
focusing on textual structure of written discourse (e.g. Choi, 1988; Engber,
1995; Ishikawa, 1995; Kepner, 1991), on the process of writing (Hall, 1990;
Hyland, 1998; Zamel, 1983), to on the social context of writing (Prior, 1995;
Silva & Matsuda, 2002; Swales, 1990). The instruction of L2 writing during the
1960s was with much focus on orthographic and grammatical aspects of written
text. The 1980s witnessed the introduction of process-oriented approaches to L2
writing research. Rather than approach the writing from the grammatical and
structural aspects, researchers started to view the writing as a creative and
expressive process of developing organization and meaning (Matsuda, 2003),
communicating genuine thoughts and experiences (Zamel, 1976; McKay, 1981;
Taylor, 1981).
A number of issues have been identified in the L2 writing process research. The most
salient finding is the importance of process-related writing strategies in L2
composition as opposed to linguistic proficiency. The research shows that L2 writers
are less concerned with linguistic problems than composing strategies, and that
composing competence, not linguistic competence affects L2 writing (Zamel, 1983,
1984; Edelsky, 1982). Edelsky‘s (1982) investigation of L2 writing of nine bilingual
children reveals that L2 writing is primarily subject to writing process and contextual
constraints, rather than language. Jacobs‘ (1982) study of eleven university students‘
written work suggests that L2 students‘ composing competence, not language
problems, determines the quality of their writing. She (1982) argued that the
difficulties in completing an assignment task as expected and achieving relevance and
coherence in writing are more challenging than linguistic factors. L2 writers‘
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