Towards an integrative unit of analysis: Regulation episodes in expert research article writing

Since the early nineties, the field of academic writing has increasingly captured the researchers' attention, partially due to the increasing relevance of writing and publishing for academics' careers. Research has mostly aimed at characterizing the writing process in either experimental writing tasks or in tasks proposed in the context of the classroom. Regarding the discourse genre, the argumentative essay has tended to focus the researchers' attention, while the sample has most frequently been composed of secondary or undergraduate students. Most of the studies specifically devoted to clarifying how writers manage, control and regulate writing have been concerned with identifying the strategies which appear to be most useful at different moments of the writing process. The results obtained in these studies have frequently ended up with lists of categories which make it difficult to portray writing regulation as a dynamic activity, especially if we understand it as a socially and culturally situated activity (Candlin & Hyland, 1999; Camps & Castelló, 1996; Castelló, Gonzalez, & Iñesta, 2010; Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001; Iñesta, 2009; Johns, 2002; Lea & Stierer, 2000). Indeed, current approaches to the study of self-regulation suggest the need to go beyond the analysis of isolated actions, identifying those patterns in which actions are organized and given a situated meaning (Järvelä, Volet, Summers, & Thurman, 2006). In this paper a study is presented which attempts to assess a new unit of analysis, the Regulation Episode (Castelló & Iñesta, 2007; Castelló, Iñesta, & Monereo, 2009; Zanotto, Monereo & Castelló, 2011), as a means to approach experienced researchers' regulation of a challenging task such as research article writing in a comprehensive way and find meaningful writing strategy patterns in ecological conditions.