ERICESPERET University of Poitiers, France Denis Alamargot and Lucile Chanquoy's book offers a vivid and original presenta tion of main trends in the research field devoted to writing. First, it provides both young and senior scientists with a comparative view of current theoretical models of composition, with different levels of reading made available: each element of these models is clearly situated in its historical context, and scrutinized in its further evo lution. Second, this well documented theoretical analysis of writing mechanisms is checked against empirical data extracted from a lot of updated experimental studies; and lack of necessary data is thought to be underlined and defined when noted. Following the usual description of writing phases initially proposed by Hayes and Flower, the first part of this book presents planning, translating and revision processes and compares them to other researchers' conceptions (from Bereiter and Scardamalia, to Kellogg or Galbraith). Such presentations of isolated models do ex ist in literature; but the present work really gives a good comparative analysis of components inside each of models, in a clear and cumulative way; a fine-grained ob servation of differences between similarly-looking models is also performed.
