This paper aims to depict a full picture of the studies on advising conducted by researchers abroad by reviewing some essential characteristics of advising and some studies on the linguistic realization strategies of advising，presenting the variables related to advising such as power relation，identity and social distance，and summarizing the main contents discussed by and the methods adopted by the previous studies on advising in interlanguage pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics and in institutional interactions．Finally，this paper arrives at some issues for the future research to deal with by discussing the contributions and limitations of the previous studies．