Introduction : teaching and learning writing

In the multilingual context of European higher education, both the need to study new linguistic situations in diverse educational contexts and the pressure to meet the demands of contemporary teaching are challenging tasks for writing research. Over the past 30 years, the study of teaching and learning of writing constitutes a major field of interdisciplinary research which has compiled a substantial body of knowledge but still expands with respect to new research questions, new research fields and new methodologies. This expansion is particularly evident in this section on the teaching and learning of writing, which contains a large number of contributions on writing and reading processes, teaching methods, learner characteristics and text genres. The perspectives of the studies vary, as do the subjects studied, the contexts, the purposes of writing and the educational situations. The section is organized into five major sections which have been defined on the basis of the main research lines or research perspectives followed: – Focus on writing instruction – Focus on writing process – Focus on text assessment – Focus on learner and teacher variables – Focus on genre This classification is somewhat arbitrary, as most studies touch on more than one field. Still, we feel that each of the following papers has a main focus that allows classification into one of the proposed subsections. Other variables and study characteristics were excluded from the classification, as, for example the participants’ characteristics (e.g. with or without learning disabilities (LD)), the educational level (primary, secondary or higher education), the methodological approach (descriptive, correlational or experimental) and the theoretical approach. Some of the papers may share several or even all of these characteristics but are placed in different sections on the basis of their main research focus