A study explored contextual influences upon the writing of students in their final year of secondary schooling. Six teachers in 6 subject areas and 12 students enrolled in 2 or more of these 6 classes were selected as case studies. The researcher spent an academic year observing the contexts in which writing occurred, recording class sessions, interviewing students and teachers about their perceptions of writing, and examining written texts. This corpus of contextual data demonstrated that student-teacher interactions were a critical influence on the nature of academic writing produced by the students. Analysis of these interactions revealed (1) that teachers' views of relationships between language and learning in their respective disciplines strongly influence the nature of writing in their classrooms; (2) that cultural, academic, and discipline-specific traditions frequently cause dissonance between teachers' pedagogical ideals and the writing they assign; and (3) that students' academic writing reflects the conflict between these first two findings. (Author/JD)