Finding One’s Voice

• In Event: “Voice” in the 21st Century and the Development of Today’s Young Learners

Abstract

Melanie Sperling addresses the concept that voice is an individual accomplishment. It raises issues and questions regarding literacy research that is premised on the notion that voice is a quality of text that reflects authorial choice and, like other text qualities, can be taught and learned. It addresses the perspectives taken by a number of researchers from linguistic and rhetorical traditions whose work suggests that voice is centered in the individual reader or writer, and the ability to write with voice, or to imbue reading with voice, demonstrates not only a particular threshold of linguistic accomplishment but also a threshold of identity achievement as well. (The phrase finding one’s voice implies this accomplishment.) When asking students to put themselves—their voices—into their writing, for example, what researchers have often studied researchers are stylistic and functional characteristics that are seen to reflect voice as a writing quality: the use of narrative, personal experience, colloquialisms, and images, for example. These are the kinds of characteristics identified by Tannon (1989) as being particularly engaging in conversational discourse and that Chafe (1982) associated more with speaking and spoken narrative than with writing. These characteristics also parallel those identified in the spoken narratives of various cultural groups (see, e.g., Bauman, 1986; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1974; Labov, 1972), and they have been prominent in research on second language writing. This presentation unpacks these characteristics from a discourse perspective, drawing on the work of Bakhtin (1986) and its extensions (e.g., Gee, 1991, 2004), using text examples written by pre-service secondary teachers, exploring the value this concept of voice has to research and to teaching. The presentation suggests ways to better understand the social and cultural nature of text characteristics and the value system that they reflect and help to maintain.

Author

• Melanie Sperling, University of California - Riverside