To browse Academia. Sociocultural theory argues that activity is situated in concrete interactions that are simultaneously improvised locally and mediated by prefabricated, historically provided tools and practices, which range from machines, made objects, semiotic. This chapter sketches a sociocultural framework for understanding writing, particularly exploring the way notions of literate activity Prior and semiotic remediation Prior, Hengst, Roozen, and Shipka ; Prior and Hengst maintain a distinct interest in both written artifacts and associated actions that are dialogically dispersed across people, tools, times, and places.
Drawing in particular on traditions grounded in the work of Vygotsky and Voloshinov, this approach argues for seeing writing as chronotopically laminated trajectories. Theoretical and methodological implications of this approach are illustrated by reviewing a line of research that has investigated writing as situated, mediated, and dispersed.
The chapter concludes with key implications of this approach for the research, teaching, and practice of writing. With an interest to go beyond an emphasis on linguistic and textual features that seem to prevail in writing practices, this qualitative action research study looked at EFL argumentative essay writing within a genre-based approach, where writing was understood as a situated social practice.
A group of undergraduate students from a B. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, class recordings, and students' artifacts. Findings revealed that participants undertook the writing of argumentative essays by bonding with their audience, establishing personal involvement with their texts, and giving support to their arguments.
The study suggests that it is important to encourage students to focus on their sociocultural and personal context so that EFL writing can be approached in a more purposeful and meaningful way. Theoretically, their edited volume aims to draw the contours of an anthropology of writing, loosely defined as "the comparative study of writing as social and cultural practice" p9 and largely inspired by literacy studies.
