In language acquisition literature, the closeness language may have to its immediate context of situation is referred to as contextualized or situated use of language. In this sense, contextualizationlsituatedness is characteristic of spoken language and its corresponding type of consciousness/cognition, which may be called situated- immediate. Such situated cognition is understood as the closeness cognition may have to the immediate physical and social situation of the thinker. However, the term situated has in fact much broader meaning and is typically used to characterize all human cognition. Thus, it does not mean closeness to our physical-social situation in the sense of our immediate interaction with it, because human cognition/ consciousness is frequently displaced. Written language calls for such a displaced mode of cognitive operation. The paper offers an analysis of a problem an EFL student has with a writing assignment. The analysis is based on the distinction between immediate consciousness, (characteristic of oral use of language) and displaced consciousness (typical of literate use of language and associated with an increase in metacognitive control). The analysis presented here can help us design better writing tasks, which are more adequate for developing advanced/academic literacy skills of our students.

Discussions of the disciplinary roots of second language (L2) composition studies contain no mention of cognitive linguistics, even though there are regular references to systemic functional linguistics, which is one of the cognitive-functional approaches to language of which cognitive linguistics is a central member (Nuyts 2007). In fact, systemic functional linguistics is recognized in composition studies as an infl uence in composition’s social turn (cf. Grabe and Kaplan 1996). However, composition researchers have apparently taken no interest in cognitive linguistics, a discipline which epitomizes the linguistic turn within linguistics. The linguistic turn became a slogan in the academic community in the 1970s, after Rorty (1967) used the phrase as the title of his anthology presenting the steps in what he called the philosophical revolution of the 20th century. The revolution meant the recognition that philosophical problems were in an important sense linguistic/conceptual: Knowledge depends on language, and philosophical concepts (e.g., truth, reality, etc.) are linguistic constructs that have a human socio-cultural (i.e., embodied and embedded) foundation rather than an ultimate transcendental foundation. As a result of this major development in 20th-century philosophy, the humanities and social sciences started to recognize the importance of language as a structuring agent of human consciousness. This fundamental idea affected the development of composition studies (bringing about its social turn) as well as contributed to the rise of cognitive linguistics in the 1980s. The paper looks into this affi nity between composition studies and cognitive linguistics, focusing on how the two fi elds are defi ned by their opposition to what is called Cartesian or fi rst-generation cognitivism.