Novice ESL writers: A longitudinal case-study of the situated academic writing processes of three undergraduates in a TESOL context

• Novice ESL writers may adopt ‘Drafter’ or ‘Planner’ approaches to writing.
• Both may produce writing rated highly by disciplinary tutors/markers.
• Investment rather than approach may be significant in producing such writing.
• More successful writers have a wider range of interactions than less successful.
• More successful writers seek out meta-knowledge about writing while writing.

This paper explores the situated academic writing processes of three ESL writers as they researched, planned, and wrote three modular assignments over the course of their first academic year on a UK university, undergraduate TESOL programme. Adopting a socio-cognitive perspective it focuses on the changing patterns of textual and interpersonal interactions that constituted the participants' processes. Data were collected over the year from day-by-day audio-recorded activity logs and interviews, triangulated with tutorial records and textual material of various kinds (chiefly, outlines, charts, drafts, electronic correspondence). Data were analysed using qualitative procedures to enable the construction of detailed narratives of developing academic writing processes. The study (a) affirms a view of academic writing as a complex socio-cognitive process implicating a range of textual and interpersonal interactions, and identifies two distinct approaches to the writing of academic texts, both of which may lead to high-quality writing and (b) finds that some novice writers engage in textual interactions which provide information about genre, rhetoric, language and the communities of practice within which they write and that this may be one factor distinguishing more from less successful academic writers.