As the ability to express written opinion is fundamental in every society, the pressure for gaining writing competence has increased in many areas, especially for academia where it serves as a prerequisite to career development and academic success. Writing academically can be a challenging task, irrespective of whether one is a native or nonnative speaker (Hyland, 2019). Developing literacy in academic writing can be particularly demanding when one has to write in a second or additional language. Linguistic demands aside, learners have to adapt to the unfamiliar discourse norms and conventions that are widely practiced and expected in the new language. Nevertheless, meeting the norms often implies greater difficulties for some groups of learners than others, and the learning processes for each learner might vary (Zawacki & Cox, 2014). Many teachers are unaware of the differences and even if they are, they have to explore the effects of such differences in their practice. This volume is thus a timely, research-based response to the growing concerns about writing in contexts or environments where the norms and expectations are different, with a focus on academic genres and practices. It is likely to be of interest to scholars and practitioners who would like to gain a greater knowledge of teaching, supervising, and evaluating academic writing. Compared to previous books on writing across cultures and disciplines, this volume covers a comprehensive spectrum, which outlines the multifaceted challenges learners face in writing, learning to write, and writing assessment. Taken together, the chapters present various theoretical perspectives and empirical findings to address the issue of crossing literary borders, particularly in academic writing contexts. They illustrate the range and variety of the cultural, social, and linguistic issues writers are confronted with when entering into a new discourse community, facing new genres, or studying for a new discipline. In doing so, the book provides valuable insights into the hidden agenda, social injustice, and other issues that otherwise would remain implicit in writing instruction and testing regimes. In the following, we introduce the content of this book, review its significance and contribution, and comment on the possible omissions. Structurally, this volume comprises eight chapters that outline the challenges “border-crossers” might face in academic writing. Golden and Kulbrandstad in Chapter 1 critically review various dimensions acting as obstacles for those who traverse borders, inside or outside academia, including the hidden agendas and social injustice implicit in language tests, the rhetorical differences in academic writing between different cultures, and language raters’ bias and unwillingness to embrace emerging varieties of English. As an opening chapter, the first chapter serves as an overview of the culture-dependent differences in writing norms, language teaching, and assessment between the East and West, and North and South. By mapping out the challenges that are germane to individual, cultural, and disciplinary differences, readers will be well anchored to go deeper into the following chapters to explore border-crossers’ experience in the increasingly multilingual and multicultural societies and possible actions to help their border-crossing adventures. Golden and Kulbrandstad in Chapter 2 delve into how the rater variability operates as an obstacle. They report an empirical study in which experienced raters evaluated two versions of texts written in Norwegian by nonnative test-takers, one version was the original texts produced in an official language test and the other version with linguistic errors being corrected, and find that raters vary in the weight given to different text traits (e.g., features related to the content, structure, and style). They presume that the Vietnamese-speaking writers might adopt a safety strategy, transferred from their former education in which formal correctness was highly stressed, and thus striving to avoid errors but at the expense of lacking the features favored by the raters. A novelty of this study lies in its research design where raters evaluate L2 writing with errors being corrected, which has seldom been conducted in the field of cross-culture rhetoric. In this way, raters’ views of the relative importance of qualities rather than accuracy, whose impact can be so great that it overshadows other qualities (Gebril & Plakans, 2014), can be better explored. This chapter provides an extensive critical review of seminal and recent works on rater behaviors in language-testing situations, which can be very informative for teachers, raters, and language-testing researchers to understand the overt and covert factors in writing assessment. Also, it adds to this line of research by bringing to the fore the challenges pertinent to raters’ varied views of how important different text features are for evaluation. More importantly, the different cultural traditions between learners’ previous and current school systems are posited to partially account for L2 writers’ writing performance. Other researchers in the field of L2 writing (Chen & Zhang, 2019) have also encountered instances where students might have resorted to prior learning experience when writing in a second language. Given the importance of learners’ prior experience for writing and assessment, we expect that there will be more research in the future that examines the role and impact of culture-dependent factors in writing and testing. Language-structure-related challenges are discussed in Chapter 3, which we consider as the most intriguing chapter of the book. Through text exploring and linguistic profiles building, Rosmawati's study sheds light on the different types of syntactic constructions in L2 students’ writing. She posits that at the language structure level, writing academically in English presents a major hurdle to students of non-Anglophone backgrounds; the challenges might result from a lack of awareness of the syntactic characteristics of academic English writing, such as concise language with dense information mainly at the lexical and phrasal levels. One noticeable difference between the study in Chapter 3 and previous relevant studies, as Rosmawati argues, is the combined use of textual coding and a multilevel synchrony mapping method to arrive at the linguistic profiles. A drawback of many of the currently available measures of syntactic complexity is that while they could give a numerical representation of syntactic complexity at each textual level, they cannot reveal what underpins or constitutes such representations. By combining the multilevel synchrony mapping method and textual coding, she succeeds in gaining a visual representation of the underpinning structures of the learner's texts, filling in a research gap caused by the drawbacks inherent in the existing measures. Rosmawati's study makes a great contribution to the field of L2 writing as, first of all, she explores the texts with a focus on nominal construction, one of the most representative traits of academic prose but left largely underexplored. Her findings provide empirical evidence in support of the proposition that academic writing at the advanced level is characterized by compact language with dense information through complex nominal structures. Also, she explores the feature of nestedness, which cannot be examined using other measures of syntactic complexity, thus capturing a more nuanced picture of the profiles of syntactic complexity in the texts produced by each learner. With such understanding, readers are well prepared to look for the causes of the manifestation of the syntactic complexity and the challenges that lead to such manifestation. Chapter 4 attends to the linguistic challenges demonstrated by English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) learners when writing in the core curriculum content areas of science. Fang and Li's Chapter 4 reports on a textual analysis study in which they draw on the systematic functional linguistics (SFL) concepts of genre and register to inform their analysis of the writing samples produced by two adolescent EAL learners. One of the main lessons to be learnt from this chapter is that EAL learners face considerable challenges in producing texts that realize the purpose of discipline-legitimated genres and meet typical school expectations for language use. Another merit of this chapter is a genre-based approach to writing instruction that aims at content learning and literacy development at the same time. The instructional procedure is succinctly presented, together with potential effects based on empirical evidence from prior research. Given the vital role of writing in science and science learning, we expect that there will be more research in the future implementing and examining the pedagogical effectiveness of the genre-based writing approach proposed here. This would be especially helpful for writing instructors who need to prepare their EAL students for further learning or practicing in science. Chapter 5 centers around EAL learners’ challenges in developing the expected academic literacy drawing on perspectives from doctoral candidates. It fills a gap by exploring their experiences of accessing support for writing development at the initial stage of doctoral studies, a particularly challenging but underexplored phrase. One of the main findings is that despite the idiosyncratic nature of the doctorate, there are shared circumstances and experiences that contribute positively to the writing development of four interviewed EAL doctoral candidates, including consultation with and receiving feedback from language advisors, supervisory guidance on language issues, and experiences of engaging with scholarly activities. Botelho de Magalhães in Chapter 5 highlights the significance of expanding EAL doctoral candidates’ opportunities to engage with academic discourse, such as participating in academic practices, to support their growth as writers. Instructors teaching at graduate level and supervisors might find this chapter especially helpful. With English being the lingua franca of academia, supervising EAL doctoral students to write academically might be their daily routine. The recommendations and suggestions in this chapter might be able to help facilitate their doctoral students, who acquired a different variety of English from that in the new academic environment, in the development of academic writing abilities. This book's emphasis on the norms that writers bring with them from their previous educational experiences and cultural backgrounds comes into focus in Chapter 6. Leskinen reports a study in which she explores immigrant students’ agency when participating in new academic literacy practices in L2 Finnish, centering on their beliefs and lived experiences. Through narrative analysis, Leskinen points to the value of taking stock of learners’ knowledge base, such as their multilingual resources and external resources, providing further support of the postulation that students’ fund of knowledge can be leveraged to improve their writing (Wei et al., 2020). Furthermore, Chapter 6 contributes to the research on academic literacies in a second language by exploring Finnish, a less widely taught language compared to English and thus underexplored in existing research. Another novelty of Chapter 6 is its application of a dialogical approach to the analysis of students’ agency in L2 academic literacies. Leskinen calls for individual support for immigrant students in academic reading and writing instruction as they might not see the new literacy practice as relevant for learning. It is a shame that more thoughts on possible solutions to the predicament are not offered. Further research should extend on Leskinen's study and investigate what individual support should be provided in pedagogical practice. Chapter 7 is devoted to a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and British student writings by exploring their use of rhetorical strategies of persuasion. Using a cross-corpora approach, Dong reports the similarities and variations in the rhetorical use of persuasive strategies by native and non-native students. The findings presented in Chapter 7 can be especially helpful for instructors teaching argumentative writing to English-as-a-foreign/second-language (EFL/ESL) learners. Firstly, an explicit instruction of the persuasive devices used by native writers (e.g., reason-oriented linguistic devices) could help L2 writers to establish a similar convincingness in their arguments compared to native writers. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese students displayed a stronger preference for pathos linguistic devices to appeal to readers’ emotional response, while the British students were more likely to resort to reason-oriented linguistic devices. Dong proposes that the differing practices of persuasive strategies between native and nonnative students reflect the latent conventionalized ideologies and sociocultural values underpinning persuasion construction. This chapter calls attention to the different ideologies that might underpin the argumentative writings in the two corpora. It bears pedagogical implications as instructors could foster EFL/ESL students’ awareness of appropriate use of persuasive devices when conveying assertions and establishing persuasion to improve their argumentative writing abilities. The last chapter concludes the book by bringing to the forefront the preparation that researchers, supervisors, and teachers alike need to consider in facilitating the transition and reposition of EAL students. Zhang depicts the border-crossing journey as a transformational apprenticeship in which learners face multiple challenges, including linguistic challenges, contrastive rhetoric, differences in rhetorical traditions, affordance, and disadvantages of being bilingual. The last chapter extends the discussion of learners from the East learning to write in norms practiced in the West beyond merely summarizing the obstacles. He highlights the importance of enhancing EAL students’ metacognition to improve their academic writing. In his view, EFL/ESL students, as biliterate or multiliterate users, need to be made aware of the multiresources they themselves bring into the learning-to-write process. Their already well-developed, high-proficient literacy can be leveraged by the teachers. Chapter 8 draws our attention to a common while often neglected understanding that English for academic purposes (EAP) is no easy task, regardless of whether one is a native or nonnative speaker. It is important for writing instructors to have such an understanding as this idea is crucial to both boosting EAL students’ morale and helping them to overcome the inferiority complex. This handbook has numerous impressive features. One of the most noticeable features is that the overall theme of crossing borders is reflected in the research topics, geographical locations, and contributor profiles of all chapters. It contributes to the existing scholarship by exploring literacy border-crossing experience from the East to the West as well as across Europe. This book has a strong cohesiveness, particularly because all authors employ a consistent structure for each chapter. All the eight chapters possess a format that reflects a typical empirical study, an introduction, a background with a review of relevant literature, followed by findings and discussion, and a conclusion. Although each chapter can be viewed as a stand-alone study, the eight chapters work best when viewed as a whole. Another winning feature is that it successfully captures all the key issues in literacy border-crossing within a single volume without overwhelming the readers with a large amount of information. The book includes a variety of topics, such as writing norms and assessment, writing proficiency development, and testing regime and practices, within a reasonable number of chapters (eight chapters) and total pages (184). Each contributor of the book has enough space to delve deeply into the topic of their particular chapter. Therefore, this book strikes a balance between being informative and not overwhelming with its abundant content. In spite of the merits, the book has its limitations. The majority of the studies included in this volume adopt an exploratory research design, using case study design, corpus-based approach, or other qualitative design. Therefore, the current edition offers few illustrations of pedagogical applications and many of the instructional approaches discussed here stay at the theoretical level (e.g., Chapters 4 and 6). Perhaps a future edition may offer not only the theories and future directions, but also evidence from pedagogical implementations. On the whole, this volume fulfills its intended purpose and brings to prominence the various obstacles learners have to overcome in developing writing abilities across cultures and disciplines. The practical stance taken by all the contributors along with the compelling findings is both timely and relevant as it highlights the linguistic and social issues writers from diverse cultures face when writing in new circumstances and genres. For those teaching or working in the field of L2/FL writing, the recommendations and implications discussed in the chapters are applicable as they can be adopted or adapted to the specific teaching needs. Despite the omissions, we believe that this book is a must-read for scholars, practitioners, and graduate students seeking to better understand writing in countries where the norms differ from the expectations or writing in new discourse communities set in new disciplines. It is the responsibilities of researchers from here on to design solid studies to maintain the gains in the research on writing across borders. This work was supported by a grant from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities for project 2662021WGQD001. The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1111/ijal.12436.