Second language writing as sociocognitive alignment

• Presents a sociocognitive approach to SLW—one that incorporates mind, body, and social action.
• Analyzes a case of collaborative professional writing.
• Results show multimodal alignment of writers as they negotiate word and concept choice.
• Relates theory and results to cognitive studies of SLW.

Second language writing (SLW) researchers have yet to examine writing as a sociocognitive process—one in which mind, body, and ecosocial world function integratively/ecologically rather than as separate phenomena. This study is a first attempt to do so. It proceeds by: (1) introducing the idea of a sociocognitive approach to language use, including SLW; (2) reviewing previous studies of writing which have taken related approaches; (3) providing detailed empirical support for the sociocognitive approach via micro-level, multimodal discourse analysis of a collaborative SLW event; and (4) discussing implications of this research for the SLW field.