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.