Members of the Polish faculty at the English Institute (Poland) primarily use English as a second language (ESL) techniques to teach writing, with grammar and idiom drills, and little writing beyond the sentence level. An American professor, on the other hand, used a process approach to teach writing by providing specific instructions about locating a suitable topic, generating or inventing information, analyzing the audience's and the writer's roles, organizing the material by mode and aim, writing the text, and carefully revising it. The students in the American professor's class performed better than those taught by the Polish faculty. Despite the process approach, the Polish students' writing was distinctively Slavic in style. Rather than favor the linear discourse that American schools promote, Slavic discourse favors a circumvoluted organization and style, which entails turning, coiling, and folding about a central concept. The types of proofs that Polish students used in persuasive prose relied heavily on definition, comparison and contrast, circumstance, relationship, and historical testimony. Polish students also rejected the scientific method and the entire "thesis" orientation to essay composition. The results of the American professor's class indicate that the process approach to writing instruction can be used successfully with ESL students when they have achieved moderate fluency in the foreign language, and that teachers need not wait until students have achieved near perfect fluency and correctness before requiring greater quantities of second language writing. (HOD)