Negotiating Voice Construction Between Writers and Readers in College Writing: A Case Study of an L2 Writer

ABSTRACT

Voice is co-constructed, a result of the “text-mediated interaction between the writer and the reader.” The present study, using the context of U.S. college writing, explores the complicated process by which an L2 novice writer—one who has a growing awareness of, yet peripheral access to, discourse practices—constructs a voice. Through interviews and a close analysis of a text, a comparison is made between the voice the L2 writer wished to project in an assigned paper and the voice constructed by two readers in the course of their anonymous readings of the paper. The significant gap between the L2 writer’s aims and the readers’ responses suggests that a writer’s view of her voice stems from the ways in which she conceptualizes discourse conventions, in association with her particular linguistic, social, and cultural background. The pedagogical implications of the L2 writer’s process of negotiating identity, and her struggles to learn discourse expectations, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• College writing
• ESL
• second language writing
• writer identity
• writer-reader interaction
• voice

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Paul Kei Matsuda, Dr. Christine Tardy, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

^1. The notion of discourse referred to in this study resonates with Gee’s (2014) concept of Discourse with a capital D. In Gee’s conception, an individual’s identities and activities are constructed and recognized in Discourses, “socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting … that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’” (p. 51). In order to enact a recognizable identity, one needs to engage in Discourses to gain access to particular sets of values, beliefs, and viewpoints, which, in return, give a valid basis for contextualizing one’s social practices.

^2. According to Matsuda and Tardy (2007), discursive features are defined as relating to both “form (e.g., sentence structures, organization, the use of transition devices, word choice) and content (e.g., the choice of topic and specific examples, argumentative strategies)” and non-discursive features including, for example, “the use of margins, the choice of font face and size, the use of blank space between words and punctuation marks as well as the use of extra line-breaks between paragraphs and block quotes” (p. 239).

^3. Due to the absence of a writing section in the Korean university entrance exam, it has been indicated that secondary school student spend a great deal of time on reading, less time on speaking and almost no time on writing.

^4. PIE is a term used in the English Composition courses at the university referenced in the study. It refers to the three elements (Point, Illustration, and Explanation) that constitute a basic paragraph in academic writing.

^5. Refer to page 11 to see the part of Jina’s paper where she reveals her Korean nationality.

^6. The combinations of verb/adjective + to-clause that express meanings related to modality (e.g., (have) got to, supposed to, ought to, need to, etc.) have semi-modal status (see Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999, for more information), and thus I refer to it herein as a “semi-modal verb.”

^7. The case analyzed in this study presents a particular context of U.S. college writing, and the context itself represents a part of the college writing discourse at Southwestern University.