[en] A chiral invariant background field method is introduced in order to study the structure of higher order terms in chiral perturbation theory. Explicit one-loop calculations are presented together with the construction of the most general O(p6) chiral lagrangian relevant for anomalous processes. The non-renormalization of the coefficient of the Wess--Zumino term in both two and four dimensions is discussed in general. copyright 1991 Academic Press, Inc