Research Paradigms: Beyond Product, Process, and Social Activity

This chapter explores how to identify research lines and paradigms in writing research by focusing on the issue of how to understand writing as an object of inquiry and how then to map writing research through multidimensional profiling. While noting the quite diverse lines of contemporary research on writing and text production, it suggests that a full theory of writing constructs writing as situated and mediated activity distributed across temporal, cognitive, social, and material environments. Finally, it argues that semiotic and transdisciplinary frameworks offer a particularly rich framework for writing research that is both theoretically-grounded and practically-oriented.