Second language writing as sociocognitive alignment Takako Nishino a,1 , Dwight Atkinson b, * a Kanda University of International Studies, 1-4-1 Wakaba, Mihama-ku, Chiba-shi, Chiba 261-0014, Japan b University of Arizona, Department of English, P.O. Box 210067, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA Received 4 April 2014; received in revised form 24 November 2014; accepted 24 November 2014 Abstract 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. # 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cognition; Collaborative writing; Sociocognitive approaches; Alignment Introduction The writer sits alone at her laptop. Following a cognitive plan, she activates cognitive knowledge, formulates text, and applies cognitive revising strategies (Flower & Hayes, 2009; Mancho ´n, Murphy, & Roca de Larios, 2007; Torrance, van Waes, & Galbraith, 2007). Highly influential across the years in second language writing studies (SLW), this view is reactivated, in a sense, each time we employ process approaches in the classroom. If the writer also happens to be a second language learner, written corrective feedback provided by teacher, tutor, or peer may promote additional, form-focused cognitive processing. Such processing may lead to either restructuring of specific mental-linguistic representations (Bitchener, 2012; Polio, 2012) or development of metacognitive revising strategies (Ferris, 2010). By these accounts, writing is predominantly a cognitive activity: we take in information, process it, and output text/ data on the model of a computer. External sources, forms, artifacts, and people may promote and even ‘‘mediate’’such cognition, but cognition is where the action is, and learning to write largely means developing new cognitive strategies and/or new cognitive representations. Cognition is obviously central to writing and its development. Yet versions of cognition assumed by cognitivist approaches tend to be ‘‘lonely’’ ones—to treat cognition as a brain-bound, internal affair (Atkinson, 2011b). In fact, Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Second Language Writing 27 (2015) 37–54 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 765 497 2353. E-mail addresses: zippyn@gmail.com (T. Nishino), dwightatki@gmail.com (D. Atkinson). 1 Tel.: +81 043 273 1320. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2014.11.002 1060-3743/# 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.