Regarding participants in discourse production and comprehension, the key roles of the speaker/writer and hearer/reader involved in communication were described by Jespersen, stating that language is a human activity “on the part of one individual to make himself understood by another, and activity on the part of that other to understand what was in the mind of the first” (Jespersen, 1924 as cited in Renkema, 1993, 8). The relative effort of the participants was studied by Olson (1977), who described ideal Western texts as the least context-dependent as compared to other cultures, that is, as writer-responsible as possible. Later, Hinds (1987) proposed a typology of texts based on reader and writer responsibility, according to whether the text demands more of the reader to establish the coherence of the text or places the “expository burden” (Connor, 1996, 20) chiefly on the writer.

The cognitive approach to writing emphasizes the role of cognition in the composition process. Its models help explain the reasons behind the use of particular writing strategies. One of the most influential models was developed by Flower and Hayes (1981). Their model consists of four interactive components in writing: task, environment (topic, audience, and the text produced so far), the writer’s long-term memory (retaining topic continuity and possible writing plans), and the composing processes. Their main findings include the identification of composition as a complex problem-solving activity, which – contrary to traditional views – is not a linear process. They also found differences between novice writers’ and skilled writers’ strategies: weaker writers are more concerned with the mechanics of writing, while skilled writers pay more attention to organizing the content of their paper. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987) discuss differences between the underlying processes of novice versus expert writing to explain how writers move from ‘knowledge telling’ to ‘knowledge transforming’. Their model accounts for the interaction between text processing and knowledge processing, which is a useful model to describe the “two-way interaction between continuously developing knowledge and continuously developing text” (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1987, 12). The concepts of discourse analysis from cognitive psychology research promote a better understanding of the acquisition, storage, representation, production and understanding of discourse (Bhatia, 1993). Useful concepts that are associated with the cognitive approach are schema theory, frame analysis and conceptual analysis. In recent decades, the importance of knowledge creation or knowledge building has become the focus of attention for educators, who understand that knowledge building is a purposeful, often collaborative act of combining ideas to build new structures, theories or solutions to problems (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2014). The complexity of goal-oriented reading-into-writing tasks is illustrated well by a study building on a novel, multi-faceted taxonomy of integrated task types showing the difference between “inter-textual and intra-textual synthesis” (Tankó, 2022, 82) and thereby contributing to the more informed teaching of academic writing.