translate the following paragraphs into Chinese. 4.Findings 
4.1. Contexts and Participants 
Table 1 summarises the top 10 most frequently investigated macro and micro contexts reported in the 136 research articles from 2012 to 2019. As shown in Table 1, Spain, the most significant contributor, accounted for 17.6% (n=24) of the total studies and was followed closely by Hong Kong (23, 16.9%). South Korea (16, 11.8%) ranked third in this respect. The top three countries/regions (i.e., Spain, Hong Kong, and South Korea) were followed distantly by other macro contexts such as Indonesia (6, 4.4%), Jordan (6, 4.4.%), and Taiwan (6, 4.4%). Except for Spain (24, 17.6%), Norway (5, 3.7%), and the Netherlands (4, 2.9%), the remaining top 10 most researched macro contexts were all in Asia, indicating a strong emphasis on English education in Asian countries/regions. Table 1 also indicates that the majority of research articles typically focused on EFL students in secondary schools (93, 68.4%); the micro contexts of primary schools (37, 27.2%) received less attention. Studies concerning both primary and secondary school contexts (3, 2.2%) were extremely limited, indicating the scant attention paid to students in the two micro contexts. These findings align with the previous observation made by Ortega (2009) and Lee (2016) that insufficient research on EFL writing has addressed students in primary schools or mixed school contexts (e.g., transferring from primary to secondary schools). Table 2 shows that the most common participants in the reviewed articles were learners (101, 74.3%), followed distantly by instructors (15, 11.0%). Eighteen articles involved both learners and instructors (13.2%), and four articles (1.5%) obtained their data from written texts (e.g., lesson plans). Table 2 also reveals that whilst EFL learners remained the focus throughout the entire period, a limited number of the reviewed studies investigated instructors or other stakeholders in EFL writing contexts, such as educational policymakers, proofreaders, writing instructors and raters, teaching assistants, and written texts. 

4.2. Research Foci and Theoretical Orientations
 Our coding results revealed eight general research foci, together with an array of subcategories to which the reviewed studies were specifically devoted. Table 3 illustrates the overall distribution of the eight research foci amongst the sampled articles. Instruction (49, 28.8%) was a dominant theme, which covered various approaches to teaching EFL writing in schools. The second most frequently researched domain was writing quality (30, 17.6%), which is subject to different predictors of writing proficiency, such as syntactic complexity. Feedback (23, 14.1%), in third place, was another pronounced topic of the reviewed EFL writing research, followed closely by the composing process (20, 11.8%). Other research foci drew less attention from researchers exploring EFL writing in school contexts: individual differences in writing (16, 9.4%), assessment (16, 9.4%), writing teacher development (11, 6.5%), and materials for teaching (4, 2.4%). In particular, the two least researched foci – writing teacher development and materials for teaching – were limited by their specific research topics, with the former focusing on teachers’ identity and beliefs and the latter on lesson plans and writing tasks.
The theoretical orientations of the reviewed articles are presented in Table 4. Five general orientations in EFL writing research were identified: socio-cognitive, cognitive, sociocultural, contrastive rhetoric, and genre. The majority of the reviewed studies adopted a socio-cognitive orientation (53, 39.0%). The second most frequently adopted perspective was the cognitive approach to writing (30, 22.1%), followed by the sociocultural approach (22, 16.9%), which conceptualises writing as a means of contextualised interaction. The two least adopted theoretical orientations were contrastive rhetoric (18, 13.2%) and genre (12, 8.8%). 

4.3. Research Methodology and Data Sources 
Table 5 illustrates the methodological orientation and data sources of the sampled articles across the period under study. The majority of the reviewed EFL writing studies were conducted based on a quantitative paradigm, with elicitation and written texts representing the primary data sources. Overall, the published studies predominantly adopted a quantitative methodology (63, 46.3%). These researchers tended to underpin the writing process by quantifying changes in students’ written texts and psychometric data. This could be explained by the fact that these studies were concerned with accounting for variation between EFL writers in the writing process, to explain relationships and to advance generalisable inferences (Riazi & Candlin, 2014). Another strand of studies took a qualitative research orientation (36, 26.5%). To lessen their dependence on quantitative data, these studies incorporated more qualitative evidence (e.g., open-ended questionnaires, think-aloud protocols, interviews, classroom observations, or written reflections), to reach a substantial consensus by comparing and contrasting individually and socially constructed realities in EFL writing issues. The third most frequent orientation was an eclectic one, which combined both quantitative and qualitative designs (26, 19.1%), followed by the mixed methods approach (11, 8.1%), which conceptualises research as having the overarching aim of integrating the traditional quantitative and qualitative paradigms (Riazi & Candlin, 2014). We noted that eclectic studies were predominantly qualitative in nature, with the accretion of some quantified data. This is in line with the features of the socio-cognitive theoretical orientation of the EFL writing context, described as the ‘explicit description and teaching of thinking processes underlying the enactment of the conventional practices of the genre students are tasked to write’ (Chandrasegaran, 2013, p. 103). As shown in Table 5, EFL writing researchers have generally used multiple data sources. Specifically, elicitation was the data source most frequently used by EFL writing researchers (98, 46.4%), including questionnaires and interviews. Elicitation was followed by text samples (70, 33.2%), including student writing texts, written feedback, and scoring results. Observation (33, 15.6%) was in third place, and mainly included students’ stimulated recall. Introspection (10, 4.7%), which involved both verbal and written reports, was the least frequently adopted source. Given the findings of Riazi and Candlin (2014) and Zheng and Yu (2019), the use of multiple data sources and mixed or eclectic research methods could be a future trend which expands the breadth of the field and deepens the interpretation of the results.