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Volume 10, Number 1/2 (2001)
Special
Issue: Voice in L2 Writing
Guest Editors: Diane Belcher and Alan Hirvela
I am How I Sound: Voice
as Self-Representation in L2 Writing
ROZ IVANIC
Lancaster University, UK
DAVID CAMPS
Instituto Technologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico
One of the characteristics
of writing is that it does not carry the phonetic and prosodic qualities
of speech. We will argue, however, that the lexical, syntactic,
organizational, and even the material aspects of writing construct
identity just as much as do the phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech,
and thus writing always conveys a representation of the self of the
writer. In this sense, "voice" is not an optional extra: All writing
contains "voice" in the Bakhtinian sense of reaccentuating "voice types,"
which locate their users culturally and historically. Writers may, through
the linguistic and other resources they choose to draw upon in their
writing, ventriloquate an environmentally aware voice, a progressive
educator voice, a sexist voice, a positivist voice, a self-assured voice,
a deferential voice, a committed-to-plain-English voice, or a combination
of an infinite number of such voices. We will illustrate this argument
with examples from the writing of six graduate students studying in
British universities. We will recommend that an L2 writing pedagogy that
raises critical awareness about voice can help learners maintain control
over the personal and cultural identity they are projecting in their
writing.
Voice in Japanese Written
Discourse: Implications for Second Language Writing
PAUL KEI MATSUDA
University of New Hampshire, USA
While the study of written
discourse that informs the field of L2 writing has generated many insights
into its generalizable features, individual variations have largely been
neglected. This article explores the possibilities for the study of
divergent aspects of discursive practices by focusing on the notion of
voice and considers the implications for L2 writing research and
instruction. I begin by examining recent critiques of the notion of voice
that emphasize its strong association with the ideology of individualism
and argue that the notion of voice is not exclusively tied to
individualism. To demonstrate that the practice of constructing voice is
not entirely foreign to so-called "collectivist cultures," I present
evidence of voice in Japanese electronic discourse, focusing on how voice
is constructed through the use of language-specific features. Based on
this analysis, I argue that the difficulties that Japanese students face
in constructing voice in English written discourse are due not to its
incompatibility with their cultural orientation but to the different ways
in which voice is constructed in Japanese and English as well as the lack
of familiarity with the strategies available in English.
Voices in Text, Mind, and
Society: Sociohistoric Accounts of Discourse Acquisition and Use
PAUL PRIOR
University of Illinois, USA
Voice is often represented
either expressively as personal and individualistic or socially as a
discourse system. Drawing on sociohistoric theory (particularly Voloshinov
and Bakhtin), in this article, I argue for a third view in which voice is
simultaneously personal and social because discourse is understood as
fundamentally historical, situated, and indexical. Specifically, I explore
three key ways that voice may be understood from this perspective: voice
as a typification linked to social identities; voice as the reenvoicing of
others' words in texts (oral and written) through processes of repetition
and presupposition; and finally, voice as it is linked to the situated
production of persons and social formations. All three are central to
discourse acquisition and use in general and to literate activity in
particular. Finally, I conclude by considering the implications of this
theoretical perspective for second language writing pedagogies.
Coming Back to Voice: The Multiple Voices
and Identities of Mature Multilingual Writers
ALAN HIRVELA
DIANE BELCHER
The Ohio State University, USA
Compositionists often speak of the need to
help students acquire a voice or identity in their writing. This interest
in teaching voice is understandable but also problematic. Satisfactorily
defining "voice," especially from a second language (L2) point of view, is
one of those problems. Another is a reliance on various conceptualizations
that privilege a "Western" or a romantic or individualistic notion of
voice in classroom situations where many students do not share such a
background. In this paper, we use three case studies to address a third
problem: a tendency in L2 writing instruction and research to overlook the
voices, or identities, already possessed by L2 writers, many of whom at
the graduate level bring a history of success as professional/academic
writers in their native language and culture to the L2 writing classroom.
We examine the role voice can play not as a teaching device but rather as
a means by which to investigate and understand the voice-related issues
these mature writers encounter in L2 contexts.
Volume 10, Number 3 (2001)
What Develops Along
with the Development of Second Language Writing? Exploring the
"By-products"
HELEN KATZNELSON
Tel Aviv University, Israel
HADARA PERPIGNAN
Bar-Ilan University, Israel
BELLA RUBIN
Tel Aviv University, Israel
The intuitive notion that students undergo
unexpected yet profound changes as participants in writing courses has
been shared by many writing teachers but, to our knowledge, has not been
systematically examined. This exploratory study investigates predicted and
unpredicted changes that learners undergo as they develop writing skills
in EFL Academic Writing courses. These changes--considered to develop
along with the writing skills--were examined quantitatively and
qualitatively in an earlier study (Katznelson, Perpignan, & Rubin, 1999).
Writing courses as agents of transformation: an exploratory study [CD-ROM.
Proceedings of the TDTR4 IATEFL Conference, Leuven, Belgium.]. In the
present study, we report on the qualitative data elicited from learners'
self-reports which yielded three perceived categories of changes: outcomes
in writing in English, outcomes in writing in general, and our major
category--"by-products" of writing courses, some of which expressed
learners' perceptions of intrapersonal and interpersonal development. Many
of these perceived outcomes corresponded to the highest of six levels of
learning outcomes defined by Marton, Dall'Alba, and Beaty (1989) as
"changing as a person." These findings may lead to a better understanding
of the nature and range of changes learners undergo in Academic Writing
courses, providing a basis for reviewing the aims of such courses and
leading us to reexamine the overall educational value of the teaching of
Academic Writing to university students.
Error Feedback in L2
Writing Classes: How Explicit Does It Need to Be?
DANA FERRIS
BARRIE ROBERTS
California State University, Sacramento, USA
Though controversy continues as to whether
error feedback helps L2 student writers to improve the accuracy and
overall quality of their writing (Ferris, 1999a; Truscott, 1996; Truscott,
1999), most studies on error correction in L2 writing classes have
provided evidence that students who receive error feedback from teachers
improve in accuracy over time. One issue which has not been adequately
examined is how explicit error feedback should be in order to help
students to self-edit their texts. In this experimental classroom study,
we investigated 72 university ESL students' differing abilities to
self-edit their texts across three feedback conditions: (1) errors marked
with codes from five different error categories; (2) errors in the same
five categories underlined but not otherwise marked or labeled; (3) no
feedback at all. We found that both groups who received feedback
significantly outperformed the no-feedback group on the self-editing task
but that there were no significant differences between the "codes" and
"no-codes" groups. We conclude that less explicit feedback seemed to help
these students to self-edit just as well as corrections coded by error
type.
Sugaring the Pill: Praise and Criticism
in Written Feedback
FIONA HYLAND
University of Hong Kong,
China
KEN HYLAND
City University of Hong Kong, China
This paper offers a detailed text analysis
of the written feedback given by two teachers to ESL students over a
complete proficiency course. We consider this feedback in terms of its
functions as praise, criticism, and suggestions. Praise was the most
frequently employed function in the feedback of these two teachers, but
this was often used to soften criticisms and suggestions rather than
simply responding to good work. Many of the criticisms and suggestions
were also mitigated by the use of hedging devices, question forms, and
personal attribution. We explore the motivations for these mitigations
through teacher interviews and think-aloud protocols and examine cases
where students failed to understand their teachers' comments due to their
indirectness. While recognising the importance of mitigation strategies as
a means of minimising the force of criticisms and enhancing effective
teacher-student relationships, we also point out that such indirectness
carries the very real potential for incomprehension and miscommunication.
Volume 10, Number
4
(2001)
The Effect of Corrections
and Commentaries on the Journal Writing Accuracy of Minority- and
Majority-Language Students
LUCY L. FAZIO
McGill University and Concordia University, Canada
This classroom-based experimental study
examined the effect of differential feedback (corrections, commentaries,
and combination of the two) on the journal writing accuracy of minority-
and majority-language students being educated in the same classrooms.
Journal writing samples were collected from 112 students (46
minority-language and 66 majority-language) over a period of four months
in four Grade 5 classrooms where the language of instruction is French.
The two student groups were randomly assigned to feedback conditions, and
feedback to writing was provided weekly. Extensive classroom observations
were carried out with the aim of determining the pedagogical orientation
of the French language arts lessons; individual interviews were conducted
to tap the extent to which students attended to their feedback. For both
student groups, results indicate no significant difference in accuracy due
to feedback conditions. Outcomes are discussed in light of students'
attentiveness to feedback and the pedagogical context of the study.
Interaction and Feedback in Mixed Peer
Response Groups
WEI ZHU
University of South Florida, USA
With the growing number of foreign
students on university campuses in the Untied States, mixed peer response
groups consisting of both native English speakers and English as a Second
Language (ESL) students are often seen in mainstream composition classes.
The study reported here examined interaction and feedback in mixed peer
response groups by inspecting participants' turn-taking behaviors,
language functions performed during peer response, and written feedback on
each other's writing. Data were collected from three mixed peer response
groups, each with a non-native speaker and two or three native speakers.
Transcripts of student discussion of peer writing as well as peer response
sheets with students' written comments were analyzed. Findings indicate
that the non-native speakers as a group took fewer turns and produced
fewer language functions during oral discussion of writing, particularly
when they were performing the writer role, but they were comparable to the
native speakers with respect to the number of global comments provided in
writing.
Exploring the Role of Noticing in a
Three-Stage Second Language Writing Task
DONALD S. QI
SHARON LAPKIN
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada
The importance of noticing as a cognitive
process in second language (L2) acquisition has been increasingly
recognized by applied linguistics researchers. However, issues concerning
how noticing is related to composing and subsequent feedback processing,
and what impact such noticing has on L2 writing improvement, need to be
addressed. We conducted a case study to investigate these issues with two
Mandarin background adult English-as-a-second language (ESL) learners. The
study documents the relationship of noticing, both in the composing stage
(Stage 1) and the reformulation stage (Stage 2, where learners compare
their own text to a reformulated version of it), to the improvement of the
written product in the posttest (Stage 3) of a three stage writing task.
The findings suggest that while composing and reformulation promote
noticing, the quality of noticing, which relates directly to L2 writing
improvement, is different from learners with different levels of L2
proficiency. We argue that while promoting noticing is important,
promoting the quality of that noticing is a more important issue to be
addressed in L2 writing pedagogy.
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