Socialization into academic writing in a second language: a social-cognitive analysis of text production and learning among Iranian graduate students of education.

The problem addressed by this study was: how do non-native speakers of English acquire domain-specific literacy suitable to their academic discipline in a graduate program? The participants were four (three male and one female) Iranian doctoral students of education in their second year of residency. To investigate the problem, I used a naturalistic qualitative approach, collecting data from four participants through questionnaires, interviews (structured, unstructured, and text-based), written documents (texts produced by the participants and course outlines), and process logs. I followed the participants through their graduate seminars over a period of five months as they were preparing for and performing assigned academic writing-tasks in their second language (L$\sb2$), English. Weekly face-to-face interviews focusing on participants' behaviours, decisions, and concerns were the central data gathering method for the study. Analysis of the data suggested that achieving disciplinary literacy in an L$\sb2$ in a graduate program such as education is fundamentally an interactive social cognitive process in that production of the texts required extensive interaction between the individual's cognitive processes and social/contextual factors in different ways. From this premise I propose a tentative model of writing development in academic contexts which identifies the salient elements of writer, reader, text, and context involved in the process and the interactions between these elements on the one hand, and the integration of task representation, composing strategies, and learning resulting in the production and enhancement of texts in specific contexts on the other.