translate the following paragraphs into Chinese 5.Discussion 
The findings of this review reveal the research contexts, theoretical orientations, research foci, and methodology that characterised EFL writing scholarship in primary and secondary school contexts from 2012 to 2019. 
5.1. Contexts and Participants 
The findings regarding the contexts and participants of the reviewed articles offer a thorough understanding of the macro geographical diversity and micro EFL school diversity as well as a profile of participants and their educational status. Our review reveals that in the reviewed EFL writing research focusing on school contexts, the typical research participants were secondary school students. This confirmed the observation made by Matsuda and De Pew (2002) and Lee (2016) that issues related to emergent L2 writing have not received proper attention. This phenomenon, in Matsuda and De Pew’s (2002) opinion, can be explained by issues of data availability and ethical considerations related to younger learners, such as primary school students. First, as suggested in Lee’s (2016) review, younger learners are not cognitively mature, and their process of learning to write in another language may be inefficient, thus reflecting the limited EFL writing instruction in primary schools. In some EFL contexts, e.g., Iran, English is not a part of the national curriculum for primary students, let alone English writing instruction (Naghdipour, 2016). In this sense, EFL writing researchers may have difficulty collecting data for their studies concerning primary school EFL learners. Second, conducting research with younger learners requires much more consideration of ethical issues. For example, in Bai and Guo’s (2018) study, which explored the influence of self-regulation strategies on self-efficacy in EFL writing amongst fourth graders in Hong Kong, permission for data collection was first obtained from the school administrators and teachers, who then helped the two researchers obtain the written consent of parents. Our findings reveal that most of the reviewed studies focusing on EFL writing in schools were conducted in Spain and Hong Kong. Similar findings have been identified in other reviews. For example, Lee (2016) observed that Spain- and Hong Kong-based research has contributed signifi- cantly to EFL writing scholarship focusing on school contexts. Riazi et al. (2018) found that Hong Kong was amongst the most researched contexts in articles published in the Journal of Second Language Writing from 1992 to 2016. However, our review also found a significant amount of research output from South Korea, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been reported in relevant research syntheses. This finding may be explained by our data collection method. Unlike some reviews (e.g., Riazi et al., 2018） which adopted a journal-specific approach to sample articles, the present synthesis retrieved articles from three major academic databases and established
comprehensive criteria for including relevant research for review purposes. Therefore, some regionspecific journals were included in the literature search, such as The Journal of Asia TEFL, which is devoted to the teaching and learning of English in Asian contexts. Some international journals based in South Korea, such as English Teaching, have also published research on EFL writing in school contexts. Indeed, English language education has developed rapidly in South Korea; Park (2009) even described this phenomenon as ‘English fever’. As observed by Hu and McKay (2012), in South Korea, the government has issued policies concerning the start of English education in the third grade, set requirements for the subject’s teaching hours, and promoted the use of English for classroom instruction. Such an emphasis on English education has an impact on the research community. Our finding that South Korea ranks third in research output accurately reflects the current efforts of scholars to improve the country’s English education, especially in writing instruction. 

5.2. Research Foci and Theoretical Orientations 
Regarding the research foci of EFL writing in schools, the findings of this review suggest four important issues. First, we identified the dominance of research on writing instruction, a phenomenon also observed in previous research overviews (de Oliveira & Silva, 2016; Hyland, 2019; Lee, 2016; Leki et al., 2008), which highlighted the pedagogical imperatives of writing classrooms. In primary and secondary education settings, the emphasis on writing instruction is understandable, given that pedagogical intervention is strongly associated with adolescent students’ success in writing and their further development in higher institutions (Graham & Perin, 2007). Amongst all of the identified writing instruction methods, genre-based pedagogy represented the most preferred instructional means in schools, supporting the observation made by Graves and Garton (2017) that this approach has gained prominence in several EFL contexts, such as Hong Kong. In particular, narrative or story writing represented the most preferred genre when teaching writing to primary and secondary EFL students. For example, Choi and Ng (2015) introduced the folk tale Cinderella to a secondary classroom in Hong Kong and investigated the possibility of enhancing students’ expressiveness and creativity by re-creating the story. Second, our review found that student writing quality was another much-researched field. Indeed, student writing is a long-standing research topic in EFL contexts, especially when writing is conceptualised as a product (Hyland, 2019). Besides, students’ writing texts provide easy access to their proficiency in L2 writing, with immediate pedagogical implications. For example, Martínez (2018) suggested that EFL writing teachers should focus more on the instruction of compound-complex sentences, the only indicator which is resistant to significant development, despite grade advancement. Third, whereas Riazi et al. (2018) found feedback to be the most researched topic in articles published in the Journal of Second Language Writing, our review identified a less prominent position of feedback in EFL writing research in school contexts. Indeed, Yu and Lee (2016), in their review of research on peer feedback, acknowledged the limited research on feedback in school contexts and attributed this paucity to primary and secondary students’ English proficiency levels and contextual factors in schools, such as curricular requirements. Finally, the current synthesis identified two largely neglected research foci, namely writing teacher development and materials for teaching. Studies concerning writing teacher development are limited not only in quantity but also in diversity owing to a focus on teacher identity (e.g., Lee, 2013) and pedagogical innovation beliefs (e.g., Tseng, 2019). As Lee (2010) argued, previous studies have paid a disproportionate amount of attention to students while largely neglecting the integral role of teachers in students’ learning to write process. A call for more research along these lines was reiterated in Lee’s (2016) later research synthesis. EFL writing teaching materials represent another less researched domain, which could be explained by scholars’ attempt to gain acceptance into the international research community. Analyses of such materials (for example, textbooks and teaching plans) are generally more meaningful in localised contexts,especially when they are government-approved and may depict sociocultural stereotypes

Of the theoretical orientations identified in our sampled articles, we found that socio-cognitive, cognitive, and sociocultural perspectives were preferred, whilst contrastive rhetoric and genre were adopted less frequently. Three issues require further explanation. First, the dominance of the sociocognitive approach in writing research was not recorded in the literature, although communication between the cognitive and sociocultural approaches has been heavily discussed in prior theorisations of writing (e.g., Bawarshi, 2003). We acknowledge the appropriateness of examining the value of each theoretical approach separately, as both have proven insightful and have been frequently adopted in writing research. A combination of the cognitive and sociocultural views, meanwhile, has also been gaining momentum in recent years, possibly due to a writing construct that has expanded ‘from simple to more complex perspectives that consider broad-based, social understandings and more inclusive images of L2 writing and writers’ (Leki et al., 2008, p. 3). Second, the few studies that have used the contrastive rhetoric approach to writing support Cumming’s (2016) statement that contrastive rhetoric faced a decline after the late 1980s, when criticism concerning its conceptualisation, research methods, and implications mounted (for a comprehensive account, see also Casanave, 2004). Indeed, this decline reflects the popularity of L2 writing theories that borrowed conceptual underpinnings from other fields of study such as psychology (Cumming, 2016). Third, genre was another of the least followed theoretical orientations, although genre-based pedagogy has been identified as a major topic in writing research in school contexts. Notably, research on genre-based instruction has not necessarily followed a genre approach to writing, given that scholars also have different orientations in genre research (namely, systemic functional linguistics, English for specific purposes, and new rhetoric), which lead them to emphasise the cognitive and social sides of composing specific types of texts (Cumming, 2016). In other words, studies concerning genres may follow sociocultural (Lindgren & Stevenson, 2013) or cognitive (Han & Hiver, 2018) orientations.