The most recent research in composition has given us, important insights into the composing process. This research has revealed that composing is a non‐linear, exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discover and reformulate their ideas as they attempt to approximate meaning. A study of the composing processes of advanced ESL students was undertaken to investigate the extent to which these students experience writing as a process of discovering and creating meaning and the extent to which second language factors affect this process. The findings indicate that skilled ESL writers explore and clarify ideas and attend to language‐related concerns primarily after their ideas have been delineated. Since it is believed that the teaching of composition should be informed by and based upon what writing actually entails, an understanding of the composing process calls into question approaches that are prescriptive, formulaic, and overly concerned with correctness. Instead, it suggests the importance of instruction that gives students direct experiences with the composing process, that establishes a dynamic teaching/learning relationship between writers and their readers, and that enhances further linguistic development in the context of making and communicating meaning.

Because writing teachers invest so much time responding to student writing and because these responses reveal the assumptions teachers hold about writing, L1 writing researchers have investigated how composition teachers respond to their students' texts. These investigations have revealed that teachers respond to most writing as if it were a final draft, thus reinforcing an extremely constricted notion of composing. Their comments often reflect the application of a single ideal standard rather than criteria that take into account how composing constraints can affect writing performance. Furthermore, teachers' marks and comments usually take the form of abstract and vague prescriptions and directives that students find difficult to interpret. A study was undertaken to examine ESL teachers' responses to student writing. The findings suggest that ESL composition teachers make similar types of comments and are even more concerned with language‐specific errors and problems. The marks and comments are often confusing, arbitrary, and inaccessible. In addition, ESL teachers, like their native‐language counterparts, rarely seem to expect students to revise the text beyond the surface level. Such responses to texts give students a very limited and limiting notion of writing, for they fail to provide students with the understanding that writing involves producing a text that evolves over time. Teachers therefore need to develop more appropriate responses for commenting on student writing. They need to facilitate revision by responding to writing as work in progress rather than judging it as a finished product.

Until quite recently research on composition and the classroom practices that it influenced focused on the written products that students composed. Reseachers and writing teachers, realizing that this focus on product did not take into account the act of writing itself, therefore began to investigate the process of composing. This research has both identified the complex nature of the composing process and raised questions about past approaches to the teaching of writing. A study of the composing processes of proficient ESL writers corroborates the findings of this research and likewise challenges ESL writing pedagogy. Since writers do not seem to know beforehand what it is they will say, writing is a process through which meaning is created. This suggests composition instruction that recognizes the importance of generating, formulating, and refining one's ideas. It implies that revision should become the main component of this instruction, that writing teachers should intervene throughout the process, and that students should learn to view their writing as someone else's reading. Methods that emphasize form and correctness ignore how ideas get explored through writing and fail to teach students that writing is essentially a process of discovery.

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