Historically, in language classrooms of about 50 years ago, writing was once seen as the “handmaid” of the other skills (Rivers, 1968), suggesting its purpose was to reinforce the “real” purpose of learning a language, namely, mastery of its grammar system. This issue is still subject to debate in foreign language (FL) classrooms (Kern, 2000), and some continue to argue that FL writing should be promoted as a tool in the service of other aspects of language learning (Homstad & Thorson, 2000).

However, specialized English-language writing courses for foreign students at American universities, for example, date back at least to the 1960s, with one of the early pioneer teacher-researchers being Nancy Arapoff-Cramer, who was based at the University of Hawaii. Around the same time that Rivers was relegating writing to the back bench, Arapoff-Cramer published numerous articles discussing the importance of teaching writing as a specific skill to EFL students (e.g., Arapoff, 1967, 1969; Arapoff-Cramer, 1971), as well as one of the earliest specialized textbooks in the field (Arapoff, 1970). In that era of first establishing a field of inquiry known as second language (L2) writing, it became important to point to ways in which L2 writers could be served by offering courses tailored to their special needs as both language learners and novice writers.

Today, rather than focusing merely on pointing to and identifying the distinct needs of L2 learners in terms of writing courses, specialists continue to expand their territories of investigation into such issues as research design, textual properties, and other broad-based issues, several of which have been addressed in this volume.