Description: In recent years, the number of nonnative speakers of English in colleges and universities in North America has increased dramatically. As a result, more and more writing teachers have found themselves working with these English as a Second language (ESL) students in writing classes that are designed primarily with monolingual, native-English-speaking students in mind. Since the majority of institutions require these students to enroll in writing courses at all levels, it is becoming increasingly important for all writing courses at all levels, it is becoming increasingly important for all writing teachers to be aware of the presence and special linguistic and cultural needs to ESL writers. This increase in the ESL populations has, over the last forty years, been paralled by a similar growth in research on ESL writing and writing instruction -- research that writing teachers need to be familiar with in order to work effectively with ESL writers in writing classrooms of all levels and types. Until recently, however, this body of knowledge has not been very accessible to writing teachers and researchers who do not specialize in second language research intruction.

This volume is an attempt to remedy this problem by providing a sense of how ESL writing scholarship has evolved over the last four decades. It brings together 15 articles that address various issues in second language writing in general and ESL writing in particular. In selecting articles for inclusion, the editors tried to take a principled approach. The articles included in this volume have been chosen from a large database of publications in second language writing. The editors looked for works that mirrored the state ofthe art when they were published and made a conscious effort to represent a wide variety of perspectives, contributions, and issues in the field. There are many other articles that could have been part for this collection, but there simply was not enough room to include everything that deserved to be included. In order to provide a sense of the evolution of the field, this collection is arranged in chronological order.

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