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Learning to write and using writing for communication and learning are not natural activities, such as learning to speak. They require a great deal of schooling. The kind of schooling that teachers offer novices or more advanced writers has changed over time.The history of writing education starts in ancient Greece at about 500 BC, where writing was a part of both rhetoric education and of more elementary schooling for clerks and other craftsmen who needed a certain technical writing ability to record information for trade and administrative purposes ( Murphy, 2001 ). It was not until the installation of the public school system in the 19th century that writing education started to gain mass. Utensils such as blackboard and chalk, stylus, slate, and pencil or pen then gained popularity in classrooms. Until the second half of the 20th century, the purpose of writing instruction was mainly to teach mechanics and conventions: handwriting, sentence construction (grammar), spelling, and punctuation. In the past half century, writing teachers began to pay more attention to text, content, style, and creativity.Another change that occurred in the past 50 years is the transition from product-oriented to process-oriented writing instruction, stimulated by researchers such as Britton, Moffett, Emig, and Graves in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, at the beginning of the 1980s cognitive psychologists such as Young, Hayes, and Flower started to perceive writing as a problem-solving activity. This led to the design and validation of writing process models, with the specifi c aim of applying the acquired insights as tools for teaching writing. The process A Short Overview of Some Insights From ResearchConstituting process variables to predict text quality. From the Hayes and Flower model (1980) , Breetvelt and colleagues distilled the main subprocesses in think-aloud protocols of 15-year-olds writing documented argumentative essays

This study investigates and compares the use of English in 1,539 prime time television commercials from five European countries: Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Our study contributes to the existing body of research by adding two methodological issues. First, we investigate whether results differ depending on which definition of the term 'English word' is used (i.e. a strict or a broad definition). Second, we explore which factor best predicts the occurrence and the amount of English used in European television commercials: the advertised product (i.e. culture-free or culture-bound) or the country where the commercial is broadcast.

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