| This study investigates the cognitive and social/cultural knowledge and strategies used by advanced L2 (second language) writers in composing English research papers (including the reading of multiple source texts), and the context influential in the composing.; Case study methodology is used to ewe three Taiwanese graduate students' composing of L2 English research papers within their fields in an American university in a natural setting over one semester. Data is gathered in multiple ways and from multiple sources, including a personal background information questionnaire, a series of intensive interviews on their process of composing a research paper for a course, a retrospective paper on their process of composing the paper, an essay on their personal writing history, observations, and documents---e.g., drafts and the final paper with the professor's comments and grade, the syllabus, and relevant course handouts and emails.; Composing research papers is found to be a main part of the discovering, critical-thinking, and learning in the participants' graduate studies. Overall, the findings are consistent with the social cognitive view that composing involves complex multifaceted cognitive and social/cultural knowledge and strategies of meaning construction in a situated discourse context. The participants' composing was influenced by four contextual factors in particular: the writer, the professor, the language, and the source texts. Their composing processes had an overall progression that involved three main stages---prewriting, text-writing, and revising-editing---which were linear in an overall sense but which recurred in a spiraling way, as the participants gradually progressed from a general focus at the start to a specific focus at the end, when their final written texts were finished. The most time and effort was spent on the prewriting stage, especially on reading source texts and on constructing a theoretical framework for their papers. Significant factors in their composing proficiency appear to have been the number of L2 English research papers previously written and their prior literacy experiences in L1 Chinese. The participants more proficient at English research paper writing were more proficient at the English academic reading involved, and vice versa, with outlining, playing an important role in both. |
