Composition Forum 43, Spring 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/43/

Knowing Students and Hearing Their Voices in Writing: Reconciling Teachers’ Stated Definitions of Voice with Their Response Practices

Ann N. Amicucci and Michelle E. Neely

Abstract: For decades, scholars have considered the construct of voice in student writing, and although defining the term remains difficult (see Jeffery; Tardy, Current; Yancey), the metaphor of voice is still useful and popular in discussions about student writing (see Bryant; Elbow, Voice). In this article, we first explore the field’s use of the term “voice” as describing writers’ subject positions within the texts and contexts in which they compose. In doing so, we represent the tensions that prior work has identified within the construct of voice. While prior empirical work explored faculty members’ identification of student writers’ voice, it has not used writing by faculty members’ own students. We then report on our study, which was designed to elicit two teachers’ identification of their own students’ voice in their writing. Findings suggest that instructors’ knowledge about their students and classroom contexts contributed to their understanding of voice in their students’ papers. The piece concludes with implications for how teachers can bring critical discussions of voice into the classroom and use our study results to inform their teaching students to attend to ideas of voice in writing.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim tells us there is an elephant in the writing classroom: when we talk about voice in writing, we’re actually talking about a certain type of voice. When teachers tell students to write with “voice,” she argues, they actually mean a homogenized voice that is “amazingly unethnically identified” (85). Lim is writing about creative writing pedagogy, but the concern she raises is equally important for teachers of first-year writing. As composition studies has moved away from expressivist pedagogies and toward pedagogies that teach students to navigate the ways their writing is constructed by social context, we have moved away from discussions of the self in writing. Talking about voice has become passé. Yet, simultaneously, composition studies has come to recognize the importance of identity in what we do (see Ivanič; Matsuda, “Identity”). Students’ subject positions matter to who they are as learners; students’ positions as aged, gendered, raced, classed, bodied individuals shape how they approach the task of writing. Lim questions, which of a student’s selves gets to be a writer in the academy? As first-year writing teachers, we must ask, in what ways do students’ subject positions shape how we respond to them as writers? And in what ways do academic discourse conventions constrain or erase the presence of diverse student writers on the page?

As a field, we know a great deal about what we mean by “voice,” even though we don’t agree on these understandings (see Jeffery; Yancey). We also know that despite theoretical understandings of writing and identity having long moved beyond the notion of a writer’s self on a page, teachers and students still engage with a concept of “voice” that quite resembles an expressivist notion of wanting something of one’s self to come through in writing (Elbow, Voice 170; Matsuda, Identity 142). The field has a range of empirical studies describing what discourse features readers align with the concept of voice and how readers construct a sense of writers’ identities, as we will discuss shortly. Yet we do not yet have studies of how teachers understand voice and identity in texts of their students—texts written by writers they know. Investigating teachers’ understandings of voice in writing is of the utmost importance to composition studies because it can help us as a field understand how students—again, students with a variety of intersectional subject positions—are received in their writing in the classroom. With this imperative in mind, we conducted a study of two first-year composition teachers’ understanding of the phenomenon of voice in two of their own students’ writing. Our findings offer a nuanced understanding of the values faculty place on voice in writing and of the role that knowledge of a student plays in a faculty member’s evaluation of that student’s work. We find that for our two participants, knowledge of a student influences how the faculty member constructs a notion of that student’s voice in writing and also how the faculty member evaluates the student’s work. These findings raise questions about the ways teachers pay attention to students’ individual subject positions in guiding students’ development as writers.

Theories of Voice in Writing: An Evolution toward a Social-Constructivist Perspective

What is a writer’s “voice”? The question troubles compositionists. Though teachers and students alike use the term “voice” to talk about certain aspects of writing, our field has a varied understanding of what the term denotes. Voice relates to but isn’t the same as ethos, or persona, or identity. When we refer colloquially to “a writer’s voice,” we often mean that we have some sense of a person behind the words—perhaps even a sense of the person who wrote them—even though we know any sense of personhood we get from the text is a construct of our own making.

Paul Kei Matsuda offers a comprehensive review of the evolution of theories of voice and identity in writing, in which he tracks how theories of voice have changed over time. We offer here a brief discussion of the phases through which theories of voice have evolved but encourage readers to consult Matsuda’s review for a full discussion of such theories (see Matsuda, Identity).

Earlier theories of voice in writing were individualistic, connecting the concept of voice to the actual writer behind a text and arguing that voice occurs when a writer brings something of him or herself to the page or attempts to construct an authentic self there. We hear notions of individualistic, writer-focused voice in ancient rhetorics, from Quintilian’s “good man speaking well” to Aristotle’s insistence that a speaker whose eunoia toward listeners is genuine will be perceived as more credible than one whose goodwill is playacted (Quintilian 197-99; Aristotle 121). This focus on the value of a speaker bringing an authentic self to his argument is echoed in Peter Elbow’s early work with voice, which focuses attention on the writer behind the words. In elucidating “the self revealed in words,” he writes, “When words carry the sound of a person—whether in fiction, poetry or an essay—they are alive. Without it they are dead” (A Method 119, 120). In Elbow’s later work, he clarifies that we can’t conflate the concept of voice with any sense of a writer’s self, yet he argues that we still get a sense of voice in a text based on how we “hear” the writer on the page and how we recognize characteristics of a text that communicate in resonant or authoritative ways (What passim). Such individualistic notions of voice fell out of fashion as theorists rejected “modernist conceptions of [the] self as singular, coherent, and static” (Matsuda, Identity 143). Yet Matsuda notes that these “early definitions of voice continue to be influential perhaps because of their intuitive appeal” (142), a comment with which Elbow would agree. Elbow writes, “So voice is alive in our classrooms. Students at all levels instinctively talk and think about voice, or their voice in their writing, and tend to believe they have a real or true self despite the best efforts of some of their teachers” (Voice 170).

As theories of voice evolved beyond a focus on the writer, they came to focus more squarely on the text. Such theories posited that what we consider “voice” has little to do with the person behind the words and everything to do with discursive features that respond to social forces shaping writing expectations. As Matsuda explains, this “social-constructionist orientation ... focuses more on the adoption of socially accepted and frequently occurring features” within writing. A social-constructionist theory of voice highlights the ways an individual writer participates in writing conventions either without realizing those conventions are socially constructed or with the aim of achieving “socially sanctioned identity positions” through such discourse (Identity 147). In turn, theories of writers learning how to construct voice in the social-constructionist vein argue that student writers engage in “pattern following” (Gillespie 160) and “parroting” (Bryant 89) in attempting discourse patterns that mimic those of successful texts.

Most recently, voice and identity theorists have come to define a social-constructivist understanding of voice, in which voice in writing does not reside in the writer nor the text but is a phenomenon that occurs within a writer-text-reader interactive triad. A social-constructivist theory of voice posits that the writer plays a role in navigating the social conventions that shape writing, and the writer’s contributions to discourse shape the nature of those conventions going forward (Matsuda, Identity 147-48). The social-constructivist perspective operates within sociocultural schools of thought (see Matsuda, “Identity”) and has ties to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work with heteroglossia and Julia Kristeva’s and following iterations of theories of intertextuality (see Bakhtin; Bazerman; Kristeva; Porter). Roz Ivanič’s theory of writing identity falls into the social-constructivist camp. Ivanič defines four types of writerly identity that account for a writer’s participation in the writer-text-reader dynamic triad and argues that writers have available to them an endless array of identity positions (23-28). For Ivanič, a writer’s construction in text is a process of navigating and rewriting social discourse conventions (32). Another such iteration of social-constructivist voice theory occurs in Christine M. Tardy’s work, in which she theorizes “dialogic voice.” Tardy writes that a “dialogic view of voice offers us a way to take into account both the individual and social dimensions that are unquestionably a part of voice. A dialogic view draws attention, as well, to the reader and to the ways in which writer and reader interact, co-constructing voice at a particular space and time” (Current 40, emphasis in original). Thus the field’s current and most robust theorization of voice recognizes that what we readers call “voice” in writing is constantly in flux and occurs amidst the interaction of a writer’s choices, discourse features on the page, and a reader’s interaction with a text.

Studies of Voice in Writing

As theoretical orientations toward voice in writing have evolved, so too has the empirical study of voice in writing. We present here two strands of empirical research related to voice, then consider the particular challenge of voice in multilingual students’ writing. First, researchers have designed studies to describe the discursive features readers attribute to “voice.” Studies of discursive features find that readers align a range of discourse features with the concept of voice, and writers use a variety of such features to establish individual identities on the page; one commonality among such studies is the identification of a writer’s own “stance” on ideas and in relation to readers as a feature that contributes to the writer’s construction of a voice or identity in a text (Hyland 161; Ivanič and Camps 12-29; Jeffery 105-06).

Second, recent studies have examined the ways readers connect what they consider to be “voice” in a text to a writer’s identity characteristics, whether real or imagined. In a study of how readers construct their understanding of an author’s voice and identity in a manuscript during a simulated blind peer review, Matsuda and Tardy found that study participants made assumptions about authors’ sex and extent of experience due to what they perceived as “voice” (246) based on certain features of the text, including rhetorical moves, word choice, and the extent to which a text made evident a writer’s scope of expertise on the subject (243). Tardy conducted a later study in which teachers were divided into two groups to evaluate student writing samples; one group of teachers read only the samples, while the other group watched a video of the writer prior to reading the text (Tardy, Voice). Tardy found that in constructing their understanding of the writer’s voice in the text, “exposure to the student videos positively influenced the readers’ impressions of the writers in several areas” (Voice 78) including the impressions they got of writers’ intelligence and writing ability. Conversely, several readers who didn’t see the videos perceived the students as lacking investment in the assignment based solely on their writing (80).

Voice in Second Language Writing

Researchers have conducted extensive studies on the concept of voice in texts composed by students whose first language is not English, which are of particular importance here because one of the two students whose writing we will describe shortly is a multilingual writer. Suresh Canagarajah examined writing samples from three ESL students and three “expert writers” to describe the strategies these writers use in constructing voice (269). He finds that both novice and experienced writers construct voice through rhetorical strategies that reveal their negotiation of discourse conventions, rather than acceptance of those conventions fully. For example, a strategy of “accommodation” is demonstrated by one writer’s choice to “adop[t] a voice and identity influenced by American discourses” while the strategy of “opposition” is exemplified by another’s choice to employ “vernacular discourse” rather than formal academic prose (284). Canagarajah writes, “Writers using these strategies are negotiating with the established rhetoric to thus construct a more positive voice for themselves. These strategies have greater chances of challenging the dominant discourses and inserting the alternate values and ideologies represented by the writers” (286).

Rena Helms-Park and Paul Stapleton conducted a frequently cited study of voice intensity in first-year college second language writers’ work in which there was no demonstrated correlation between scorers’ assessment of a text’s quality and the intensity of voice present in the text (252). Yet following studies of voice in second language writers’ work have contradicted these findings. In replicating the Helms-Park and Stapleton study of voice intensity, using writing samples from a state English Language Arts examination in New York, Cecilia Guanfang Zhao and Lorena Llosa did find a correlation between the intensity of a writer’s voice in a text and the assessment of the text as strong (162). Along similar lines, David Hanauer’s research has demonstrated the prevalence of a distinctive voice in second language writers’ poetry. Hanauer studied second language writers’ poetry and used both human raters and corpus linguistics analysis to explore whether poems demonstrated a recognizable “voice” for each poet. Both the human raters and the computational analysis found distinctive features in students’ writing, leading Hanauer to conclude that “readers can systematical[ly] discern the poetry written by the same second language writer (from that of a different second language writer) and that second language writers do use individualized and systematically different patterns of word usage in their written poetry” (80).

Despite Zhao and Llosa’s and Hanauer’s identification of distinctive voice in second language writers’ work, the concept of voice can present a challenge to writers who are new to English. In conducting a study of a Japanese writer’s construction of voice, Matsuda found the writer to be adept at forwarding a distinctive individual voice “by combining various discursive features that were socially available to her” in Japanese, demonstrating that the writer was skilled at the ability to construct a voice in writing (“Voice” 50). Yet, Matsuda writes, “those features have no counterparts in English, [so] they are untransferable” (51). Matsuda stresses that writers may have facility in constructing what we think of as voice on the page in one language but not another, given the limitations of English to allow for discourse features possible in other languages. Studies of voice in second language writing highlight an additional layer that researchers must consider: that multilingual students writing in English are not only tasked with navigating the rhetorical complexities of crafting a voice in a text but are tasked with the additional challenge of doing so in a new language. When we consider how a sense of “voice” emerges from a writer-text-reader interaction, we need to recognize that writers’ positions as speakers of one or more languages contribute to this phenomenon.

Our field does not have a unified notion of what we mean by “voice” (Jeffery 93; Yancey xvii), due in part to the competing values placed on older, albeit more accessible notions of individualized voice and contemporary, perhaps less accessible social-constructivist notions of the concept (Matsuda, Identity 142-43). Yet the empirical studies cited here paint an important picture of many of the ways we do understand the concept of voice and of the potential for understandings of voice to affect assessment of writing and for multilingual students to enact what readers interpret as “voice” in more than one language. An important subset of these studies, for our purposes, is the research cited here that demonstrates that readers’ knowledge of a writer’s identity—whether real or imagined—affects how the reader interprets and assesses the writer’s work (see Matsuda and Tardy; Tardy, Voice). What is missing in the body of empirical research on voice is a study that examines how teachers’ knowledge of their own students’ identities shapes understandings of voice and assessment of writing. Prior studies of voice all ask readers to assess the concept in the work of writers they do not know, even in the case of Tardy’s study in which readers were given videos to watch about these writers. Our study makes a first step toward filling this gap by examining how the phenomenon of voice occurs when readers do know the writer. Our study is significant because it offers a new angle on voice research: we offer a small-scale study of the ways that two teachers’ knowledge of two students’ identities influences how a sense of “voice” emerges in teachers’ reading of these students’ work and how that prior knowledge of who students are influences teachers’ assessment of their work.

Method of Data Collection and Analysis

To better understand the puzzle of voice and the role that knowing a student plays in a teacher’s process of reading that student’s writing, we designed a study guided by the following research questions:

1. How do faculty describe the phenomenon of “voice” in student’s academic writing?

2. What evidence in student writing do faculty cite as demonstrating a student’s “voice”?

3. What role does faculty knowledge of a student’s individual contexts play in identifying or defining student voice in writing?

To answer these questions, we created an interview and think-aloud protocol to prompt faculty discussion and identification of instances of voice in students’ writing (see Smagorinsky; Swanson, O’Conner, and Cooney).

Two faculty members agreed to participate in the IRB-approved study. Each was asked to choose an exemplary student paper from one of their recent courses, remove student identifiers, and bring this piece of writing to the interview session. In each interview, we asked the faculty member to read this piece of writing twice while thinking aloud: once as though they were grading the text and then a second time to identify instances of student voice within it. These two separate readings allowed faculty to conduct a writing evaluation during the first think-aloud pass and then, having moved beyond an evaluative or grading mindset, to read the work again and identify and discuss instances where the writing seemed particularly “voiced,” as per their own definition of “voice.” Each session, including the interview and read-and-think-aloud passes, took between fifty and seventy-five minutes.

Participants and Context

Participants were recruited from a pool of full-time faculty teaching first-year writing courses at a regional western, public, four-year university with high undergraduate enrollment and a high transfer student population (>30%). The campus has approximately 12,500 undergraduates, and their average ACT score is 23.5. Among this student population, 53% are female and 33% are from an ethnic minority. Approximately 20% are military affiliated (Quick).

Leah had been teaching first-year writing courses for three years after earning her master’s degree. She brought a paper to our session that had been written by Lawrence, a student in her English 101 course; this course fulfilled the first of two core composition requirements at the study site. We learned from Leah’s interview that Lawrence was older than the average student (>25 years old) who was also a military veteran.

Thomas, our second faculty participant, had been teaching writing courses for about nine years after earning his master’s degree, and he brought a paper to our session from Tina, a traditionally aged student from Central America whose first language is not English. Tina was a student in Thomas’ English 100 course, a course that fulfills the same requirements as Leah’s English 101 but is stretched across a two-semester sequence. Students enrolled in English 100 are placed into the course based on their standardized test scores. The curriculum for English 100 and English 101 are the same, though the pacing is different.

Data Sources

We collected three sources of data: interview transcripts, think-aloud protocol transcripts, and exemplary student papers. Roughly the first ten minutes of our meeting with participants, prior to the think-aloud protocol, involved a semi-structured interview designed to build rapport and help us understand participants’ teaching experience, practices, and conceptualization of “voice.” As we transcribed the interviews, we removed identifying information about the faculty and students and assigned pseudonyms to participants and the students they referenced. The bulk of our meetings with participants involved their thinking aloud as they read the exemplary piece of student writing they brought to the session. As with the interview transcripts, we removed identifying information about the faculty member and students as we transcribed these audio files. In order to ease our transcribing task, we requested copies of these de-identified student papers so that, when reviewing the audio files, we could better determine which parts were our faculty participants’ commentary about the student writing compared to the actual text a student had written.

Data Analysis

Given the exploratory nature of our research questions and our interest in the way these two faculty defined and operationalized the concept of “voice,” we approached the analysis of the think-aloud and interview transcript data from a grounded theory methodological perspective (see Charmaz; Strauss and Corbin). Thus, while we were broadly interested in the way faculty conceptualized voice as they read student writing, we remained open to emergent themes in the transcript data. Voice was the phenomenon we wanted to explore, but we did not have preconceived notions of categories nor the ways that student voice would manifest in faculty readings of student writing.

The first analytical step we took was to closely read transcripts to gain a holistic sense of participants’ experiences. Once we read through the data set as a whole, we then defined units of analysis. In the think-aloud data, units of analysis were instances when the faculty member stopped and commented on a particular passage of student writing or, in the case of the interview, responded to one of our interview questions. Within those instances, we identified “utterances” (Smagorinsky 6) and coded these utterances, working to keep our codes precise and congruent with the data. A single utterance could be assigned multiple codes. Following grounded theorist Barney Glaser’s guidelines, we used gerunds for initial codes, as they better captured the “sense of action and sequence” happening within the transcript data (Charmaz 120). Our coding process was highly recursive and involved checking back with the transcript data throughout our analyses. See Table 1 for the evolution of our coding scheme.

After identifying preliminary codes, we returned to the transcripts to conduct axial coding, with the goal of understanding dimensionality within some of our codes (Strauss and Corbin 121). As we re-examined the transcripts to identify gradation within some codes, we also conducted focused coding to identify our most useful initial codes (Charmaz 144) and then “saturated” them with examples from our two interview transcripts (106). At this stage, we decided which existing codes were suitable for explaining the way faculty participants understood student voice in papers and which codes we could allow to “fall away” due to lack of substantial support from the transcript data (see “Later Analysis Stages” in Table 1 for final codes and subcodes).

Next, we approached the transcripts independently to apply these codes and subcodes to test rater reliability. After we each had separately coded half of each transcript, we compared codes and calculated a percentage of reliability for this portion of the data. While we each identified the same noteworthy transcript utterances, we puzzled in many places over which codes fit an utterance best. As a result, our initial inter-rater reliability was 70%, which is low (see Smagorinsky). In order to strengthen the reliability of our coding, we opted to code the entirety of data together, negotiating codes for agreement and a richer understanding of the data along the way. In coding together, we reached 100% agreement for the assigned codes.

Table 1. Development of Coding Scheme

EARLY ANALYSIS STAGES		LATER ANALYSIS STAGES
Emergent Themes	Initial Codes	Final Codes	Final Subcodes
Defining voice	Identifying voice in student text Explaining concept of voice	Defining Voice	Academic Conventions Tension between voice and conventions
Individual Student Context	Knowing the student Remembering earlier student work and/or drafts Assuming student intention Linking student choice to course content	Knowing the student as individual	Student choices
Academic writing context and expectations	Describing academic convention Identifying tension between academic convention and writer freedom Evaluating student writing	Evaluating Writing	Positive Evaluation Negative Evaluation

Findings

In the section that follows, we narrate the findings of our three final coding categories with evidence from the interviews. Recall that our study goal was to better understand faculty perception of voice in student academic writing and the examples of voiced writing that faculty members brought to the think-aloud session.

Defining Voice

Early in the interview session, we asked each participant to describe the concept of “voice” in writing as he or she understood it, and each offered a definition that illustrates these teachers’ struggles with the term. For Leah, voice in students’ writing related to offering appropriate and clear context. She explained that voice is “that ability to be passionate about something but still be clear and acknowledge other points of view ... and kind of have an academic feel to it.” Thomas’ response, on the other hand, skirted the definitional question by offering another term:

I usually go with ‘tone’ because voice seems a little personal and it kind of gets into aspects of who you are, and I think we have a lot of different voices that we’re trying to employ in a lot of different situations, so I kind of focus on tone to keep it separate from the idea of identity ... I don’t see it as their own personal identity necessarily, I see it as the identity that they are trying to represent through the writing ... it’s constructed.

Thomas distinguished between a constructed identity on the page and any real identity of the writer’s, preferring to keep his focus on the former.

As these faculty located instances of voice in their students’ papers, their comments focused on contrasts between what did and did not sound like a student’s voice. This identification was influenced by faculty knowledge of students’ individual context. Participants’ comments tended to fall along a range as each identified instances of a student’s voice versus another voice, sometimes his or her own as the course instructor, coming through in the text.

Leah’s student wrote a rhetorical analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and in discussing the content choices Lawrence made, Leah noted an early paragraph in which Lawrence analyzed King’s ethos. She explained, “I do see him as less present here. Because these are all things we talked about in class. And so um that’s what he’s doing in this paper, is just giving me back what I gave him.” She pointed out the following paragraph as well, which was also about ethos, saying, “When he makes this move Ethos is defined as ... That’s me! Right? Because I require a definition.” Leah explained that her assignment requirements that students define rhetorical terms influenced what Lawrence wrote and that his definition of ethos was the same one she had provided in class. She added, “Instead of weaving the definition in, he puts Ethos is defined as. That’s not him anymore. That’s me because that’s what I required.” Whereas Leah expected students to define terms in their own words, she instead heard Lawrence parroting her own voice back to her.

In contrast, Leah saw Lawrence as more “present” in the paper when she could identify his deeper engagement with the content, an identification she saw in the latter parts of the paper. She explained, “Here I really hear his voice. The sentence structure to me is a little more complex and it shows his level of thinking. He’s not saying [simply] This enhances Dr. King’s ethos by ... This is, I guess the best way I can characterize it is, the sentence structure’s more complex ... I get the feeling that this is really him at this moment.” Taken as a whole, Leah’s identification of Lawrence’s voice centered on the type of thinking he illustrated and the degree to which he exercised independence and creativity in his composition. When he created something new from the assignment or course content, Leah saw—and valued—her student’s voice in the text.

Thomas’s student wrote a rhetorical analysis of a television advertisement by the Colombian tourism bureau. Tina was originally from Ecuador and had also lived for a time in Colombia before coming to the United States for school. Thomas’s identification of Tina’s voice was similar to his explanation of voice being defined as tone or style. For instance, he labeled Tina’s ordering of ideas in the essay as an issue of style and voice by noting, “It [Tina’s movement to a new idea] might be a bit too sudden. It might be nice to have mentioned Colombia in the previous paragraph. Or to add some kind of introductory phrase there, which to me is a style issue. It’s a voice issue.” Here, voice for Thomas concerned the choices Tina made in how to move a reader through her ideas. Her manner of introducing a new idea quickly without providing what Thomas perceived to be necessary context was a place where he identified the presence of Tina’s individual stamp on her writing.

As the think-aloud protocol continued, Thomas’s identification of voice became bound up in his knowledge of Tina as an English Language Learner. Tina used the word “foreigners” multiple times in her essay to refer to individuals who were not native to Colombia, and Thomas speculated about her decision to use this word:

So she says here the ‘ethos of foreigners’ and I think ‘foreigners’ is an interesting choice. Right? So she literally means ‘foreigners,’ people who are foreign to Colombia. I think if she had said something else there, I mean, I’m not sure what other word she could pick, right? So, I think stylistically ‘foreigners’ kind of takes me aback a bit. But, when I sit and think about the context it actually seems appropriate ... [it does] initially seem derogatory, but she doesn’t mean it in that way at all. And I’m not sure I could think of another term that accurately describes what she’s trying to describe here. She doesn’t mean foreigners to America, right? She means foreigners to Colombia. So somehow that makes it better.

Because English was not Tina’s first language, Thomas questioned whether she knew how the word “foreigners” might be interpreted by primarily English-speaking readers, yet he rationalized her use of the potentially offensive word by arguing that it was the best choice. The stylistic choice to use a word like “foreigners” was, for Thomas, a place where he heard Tina’s voice in her writing.

Knowing the Student as an Individual

In the think-aloud protocols, we saw that each faculty member’s knowledge about the student influenced his or her evaluation and explanation of student writing choices. Each faculty member drew upon his or her understanding of the student’s context, including the student’s life experiences, previous essay drafts, office hour discussions, and in-class contributions, to construct and explain the student’s voice in the paper.

During Thomas’s think-aloud protocol, he frequently stopped to share his insider knowledge of Tina with the interviewer. About halfway through the session, he stopped reading the essay to explain why Tina was belaboring the Colombia tourism advertisement tagline “The only risk is wanting to stay.” Tina had included a sentence explaining that tourists who overstay their visas could be labeled as illegal “aliens.” The sentence seemed tangential to the analysis, but Thomas shared the following:

One of the interesting things I think that’s happening with this essay is the student is a non-native speaker, she’s actually from Ecuador, and she’s lived through some of the experiences she’s describing. So, she moved to Colombia with her husband, and then they got divorced, then she found out that because she wasn’t married to him anymore that she was an illegal alien. And, so she had a three-month window to get her visa renewed, and then nobody told her that, so I think it expired, and then she had to leave and go back to Ecuador, then apply and then come here to finish school.

Thomas went on to explain Tina’s choice about including this sentence and to evaluate her writing based on that choice, explaining, “So, it was challenging for her. I think she, she didn’t go too far into that [in her paper]. There was a real risk of, when you have a personal connection to it, to really like dive into that. But I think she minimized the bit about illegal alien stuff just to where it was relevant. I thought that was a really good choice.” As Thomas explained, his knowledge of Tina’s background shaped how he responded to her writing. Without such context, he may have found certain information to be off topic in the essay, but because he knew Tina’s background, he evaluated her rhetorical choice to include this information as savvy.

Similarly, we found that Leah’s knowing her student also contextualized her explaining Lawrence’s voice and evaluating his choices in the essay. As Leah read one of the earlier paragraphs in Lawrence’s essay, she explained her evaluation of his writing, saying:

This paragraph is not quite as strong for me. I think his topic sentence is really good. He moves us from one idea to the next idea and that’s strong. But I can see that his thoughts in here are not as strong. He’s a bit repetitive, and his sentence structure isn’t as strong as it is in other places so I can see that he’s struggling a bit. He knows that there’s an idea here, but he’s still making the right rhetorical moves.

Leah continued her explanation by situating her evaluation in contextual knowledge about Lawrence:

[He] was a vet, so he’s got a lot of life experience, and so I actually expect more from him. And so if another one of my students had written this I would have been, Wow!, you know. [If] one of my younger students had come up with this then I would have been like, Okay, they’re trying, they’re struggling with some of these ideas and trying to get them out. Sadly, like I said, I kind of expect more from him.

Whereas Thomas’s knowledge of Tina led him to evaluate her work more favorably, Leah’s knowledge of Lawrence led her to be more critical of his work. As she explained, she held Lawrence to a higher standard than some other students because of his age and life experience.

Academic Conventions

Both faculty members grappled in the think-aloud protocols with allowing student creativity and self-expression within the specifications of their assignments. Leah recognized Lawrence’s maturity and a desire on his part to sometimes go “off message” in his essays, and she struggled with having constrained his focus to the assignment parameters. She explained, “That’s where I battle. Because I do hear the critique that ‘they [professors] just want to hear what they’ve told us [students] in class. Just give ‘em what they said.’ And really and truly that’s not what I want. I want them to think. But how, I don’t know how to do that, because he also needed to do the assignment.” The “that” Leah refers to here is the challenge of the student’s thinking for himself and not just parroting her own knowledge back to her while accomplishing what the assignment asks for at the same time. Leah explained that curricular requirements meant she had to get students to write more essays than they may have had time to write well. These requirements challenged her to get students to produce a lot of writing to fit academic conventions and left little wiggle room for creativity on students’ part. She explained that “part of what I’m teaching is that writing needs to do what it’s meant to do” within a specific context.

Thomas identified a similar tension between a student’s impulses as a writer and the confines of academic writing with regard to the cultural writing conventions of Tina’s home language. He explained, “Different rhetorical style is cultural ... Spanish writing is not as forward as American writing. So, the thesis isn’t right at the beginning ... there’s a sense of circling the issue ... for this writer that had been a bit of a struggle. Something that I had to make her aware of. That [Spanish] style is totally legitimate, but American texts expect you to have a central thesis.” He later pointed out a turn-of-phrase that Tina had used multiple times in her essay, but that she had not really explained to her readers:

So, I think one of the things stylistically that jumped out is, she’s used this phrase twice now, ‘the subconscious speaks to the consciousness of the viewer’ which I think is interesting and it’s lovely, right? It’s a lovely little phrase, but she hasn’t quite broken down what she means by that, right? So, I think that’s a break between a more personal style and an academic style. In an academic style, we’re going to expect you to break that prettiness down and tell us what you mean practically by that. And she hasn’t done that, which to me is a bit of a style issue. I think, but, that’s a gradual thing, right? That is becoming more versed in academic prose.

Thomas recognized that students may play a bit with their words, perhaps in some cases valuing “prettiness” or “sounding academic” over a clear, substantive explanation. His generous reading of Tina’s choices in this instance again speaks to his recognition of her development as a newer undergraduate writer.

Discussion

Each participant had a way of explaining what voice in writing is, though these explanations became complicated when they discussed actual student texts. Both teachers conceptualize voice in social-constructionist terms in that they see voice as a phenomenon resulting from a writer’s working within a framework of existing expectations. For Leah this phenomenon occurs when a student develops writing with an “academic feel,” and for Thomas it occurs in the construction of a writer’s “tone” on the page. When Thomas identifies what he sees as voice in his student’s writing, his identification is consistent with this definition, in that Tina’s abrupt changes in ideas or use of the word “foreigner” show her navigating, to varying degrees of success, the discourse conventions shaping her writing. Thomas’s identification of such style or tone choices in Tina’s writing aligns with findings in Jill V. Jeffery’s study, in which teachers connect writers’ tone to their understanding of a writer’s voice. In particular, these teachers evaluated the degree to which writers are “‘passionate’ and ‘committed’” or, at the opposite end of a continuum, give a “‘perfunctory’” discussion of a subject as indicative of “voice” in writing (Jeffery 109).

Yet when Leah identifies what she sees as voice in her student’s writing, her identification diverges from the social-constructionist definition she holds, and she attends to the writer’s self by identifying certain phrases and sentences as evidence of “him” or “not him” on the page. There is not another existing study of identification of the voice phenomenon in writing by someone whom the reader knows, but Elbow’s theoretical discussion of ways of understanding voice speaks to this type of identification. Elbow calls one such understanding “dramatic voice,” explaining that “we tend to read a human quality or characteristic” into the way a person speaks, even when we do not know the person, so we in turn attempt to read such characteristics into writing (“What” 7). Further, he explains, “[W]e may read certain wooden or tangled texts and say, ‘There’s no one in there’” (8, emphasis in original). Elbow’s distinction is between a sense of a person that is present or not present. Leah’s distinction in reading her student’s writing is between a sense of her student that is present or a sense of her student being absent when he instead parrots her voice. As Lizbeth A. Bryant notes, “When new voices enter the writer’s construction zone, writers react in various ways: rejecting, parroting, mimicking, and integrating” (89). In moments when Leah identifies writing as “not him”—not her student’s voice—she simultaneously notes that her students have simply parroted the type of content she has demonstrated and called for in students’ writing, such as content that defines rhetorical terms.

For both teachers, explanations of voice in writing are complicated by knowledge about the student writer. In each teacher’s description of a student’s writing, we recognize the influence that knowing the student plays on how the teacher understands, evaluates, and hears voice within a text. Thomas rationalizes Tina’s use of potentially offensive words such as “foreigners” and “aliens” by deeming them rhetorically effective given her cultural background. Leah critiques Lawrence’s repetitive ideas and what she calls “sentence structure” that “isn’t as strong” in a paragraph, features she evaluates more negatively than she would for other students because Lawrence’s age and background as a veteran tell Leah he is capable of more as a writer than his paper shows.

In examining the relationship among themes, our transcripts revealed a process of influence in which knowing a student influences how a teacher reads or hears that student’s voice in writing, which, in turn, influences how the teacher evaluates that student’s writing. In Thomas’s think-aloud protocol, for example, we hear several opinions he holds about the writing in Tina’s essay, such as the place in the essay where Thomas points out material about immigration that to another reader may seem unnecessary to include. Because he knows Tina’s background, he not only understands the inclusion, he is also able to recognize Tina’s choice not to include too much information, since she could have chosen to tell her personal story. Because he recognizes that this negotiation of what to include took place, he determines that Tina included material “just to where it was relevant” and calls this “a really good choice.” Knowing Tina means that Thomas recognizes her in her writing in ways another reader could not, and this recognition leads him to a favorable evaluation of her work.

Each instructor recognized the range of prior experiences that the student writers bring to the composing situation, animating and attributing some decisions of the writer to their lives outside of the classroom. This plays out as Thomas contextualizes Tina as a multilingual writer and international student, understanding those identity categories as strengths that she brings to the assignment and her critique of the advertisement she selected. By allowing for this type of criticism, and recognizing it, both Thomas and Leah have fostered a classroom that values critical academic literacy in first-year writing, practices that Jennifer S. Wilson explains as recognizing student ideologies and linguistic diversities within the classroom and the constructed nature of those diversities (2). Further, Leah recognizes Lawrence’s veteran status and the composing decisions relative to what she knows about his military background, which may include a breadth of prior learning and training situations and openness to instruction and feedback (Hinton 3).

In addition to shedding light on how these teachers conceptualize voice and evaluate students’ writing, our interviews revealed an additional factor at play in the process of reading student writing: expectations of academic writing, which are an ever-present context in our teacher’s discussions and in their students’ writing. Both teachers talked about the challenge of presenting academic expectations to students and having students negotiate these expectations in light of their own desires as writers.

In our participants’ description of the challenge of negotiating academic expectations and writers’ own desires, we see their struggles with the social-constructivist nature of writing. In the writer-text-reader dynamic triad, a student writer wrestles with social expectations for writing and may shape those expectations in the ways he or she participates in discourse. It is the dynamic nature of this triad that makes entering academic or any discourse difficult to teach, because there is no stable “best way” to write in a given discourse setting, and teachers must enable students to engage in ongoing navigation of their own contributions as writers and the contributions of social forces. All three parts of the triad are in flux: the writer has attitudes about what he or she brings to the page, the course of study brings its own context that shapes how a text is expected to look and function, the teacher-as-reader brings his or her own expectations, and all of these forces change as a writing task or any of its aspects change. Dynamism also occurs through the choices writers make to accept or reject discourse conventions. As Ivanič writes, “In institutions of higher education certain ways of being are privileged by being supported by more powerful groups within the instruction, but they are not monolithic ... There already exist alternative ways of being, and the established possibilities for self-hood are being resisted and contested” (13). In navigating their “possibilities for self-hood,” Ivanič explains, writers choose among those possibilities that adhere to dominant conventions and those that resist, and contribute to the resistance of, such conventions.

For Leah’s student, negotiation of her personal preferences and of academic conventions occurs in the struggle between Lawrence’s fulfilling his own desires in writing and fulfilling those of his teachers. Leah perceives that Lawrence and other students think teachers want students to say back to them what the teachers have taught, but she explained, “that’s not what I want.” She says she wants Lawrence to think for himself but knows that doing so sometimes contradicts what it means to fulfill an assignment’s expectations.

The value Leah ascribes to writing in which a writer thinks for himself aligns with findings in other studies of voice in writing, in which a writer taking his or her own stance on a topic is favored by readers. For example, in one of his studies of identity construction in John Swales’ writing, Ken Hyland finds that Swales achieves connections with readers through the specific stance he adopts—a stance in which the author establishes his own views but simultaneously loops in readers “into a collusive web of agreement” with those views, which raises both his and his readers’ credibility, in his readers’ minds, in the process (178). Along similar lines, Ivanič and David Camps find, in their study of the writing of six graduate students, that student participants achieve academic discourse conventions by positioning themselves as authorities on a subject (26). Though Leah does not consider Lawrence to have achieved a stance in writing that represents his own take on his topic, such a stance is one she purports to value and one she says she struggles to help writers like Lawrence achieve.

For Thomas’s student, the negotiation between personal writing preferences and academic writing expectations is due to cultural differences. He describes Tina’s “rhetorical style” as including a “thesis [that] isn’t right at the beginning,” a feature he attributes to her cultural background. He explains that while Tina’s chosen style is “totally legitimate,” she is also faced with writing in an American educational context where her style conflicts with an expectation on the part of American readers that an essay’s thesis will be presented early in a paper. Thomas’s discussion of a relationship between Tina’s rhetorical style and her cultural background echoes Matsuda’s finding that writers working in a new language may be limited in how they can position themselves in a text, due to limitations in English (Voice 50). Yet for Thomas, some instances of Tina’s falling short of what he calls “academic style” are less about her not achieving something in English and more about her working toward command of the style he is teaching. In our interview, Thomas recounted a story of another student who sought out feedback on how to revise a paper but resisted the idea of revising to Thomas’ feedback. Thomas explained, “He said, ‘Well, it’s my writing. Can’t I just write it how I want? It’s my style and how I want to do it.’” Thomas said he told the student that if his paper didn’t achieve the goals of the assignment, his grade would suffer, but, at the same time, Thomas would respect his choice to reach the assignment goals in his own way. This anecdote shows that helping a student stay true to him or herself while also accomplishing what academic writing requires is an ongoing challenge, not a cut-and-dried task.

Implications for Teaching

In considering what these study findings mean for the teaching of writing, we encourage teachers to maintain a reflective stance: to recognize that knowledge of our students does affect how we read their work, how we evaluate it, and how we understand and interpret what we consider to be voice in students’ writing. Yet simply maintaining awareness of the fact that knowing our students affects how we read their constructions of voice in writing is not enough. In what follows, we share ideas teachers can implement in the classroom in response to our study findings. We discuss the importance of sensitivity toward student challenges then present two ways of bringing critical discussion about voice into the classroom.

First, we encourage teachers to be sensitive to the challenges students face in the academic writing classroom. Despite having produced academic writing for years, students in college are learning to write for a new discourse community with new, sometimes strange conventions. We should not fault students for approximating academic discourse, even when that approximation appears to parrot a teacher’s method of speaking or writing. Such approximations are signs that students are paying attention to discourse conventions and trying with varying degrees of success to meet them. All of the writing tasks students will encounter in college and beyond will require rhetorical approximation, and students may continue trying out new sets of discourse conventions for years before they settle into a type of professional writing they do often enough to master its conventions. We entreat teachers to recalibrate their expectations by recognizing that achieving the type of voice our two faculty participants describe is a great deal to ask of students. To be able to express one’s own ideas in one’s own tone within the confines of an academic assignment is a difficult task, and teachers will do well to recalibrate their expectations from originality to skilled approximation of discourse conventions.

Second, we encourage teachers to bring the subject of voice construction into the classroom explicitly to teach students how to navigate the challenges of writerly voice. We describe here two voice-related topics to bring into the classroom: parroting and accent. As discussed earlier, our participant Leah was disappointed that her student did not go as far in his writing as she knew he was capable of when he parroted her own words back to her. We suggest teaching the subject of parroting by structuring a class meeting around the question, What does it mean to try to write in a way that a set of readers expect and that a writer may not fully understand or even value? First, bring a piece of your current writing in the draft stage into the classroom. Explain your thought process in navigating readers’ expectations and deciding what type of language to use. Display a portion of your draft on the projection screen and spend 5-10 minutes revising sentences while explaining your thought process aloud to demonstrate how you navigate readers’ expectations while trying to convey a message in words that are authentic to you as a writer. Invite students to comment and ask questions in the process, then ask the class to discuss the resulting sentences and to identify which sound like your everyday speech and which sound like you adopting a different persona for the purpose of the text.

Next, give the class your definition of a rhetorical concept, then ask students to write explanations of the concept in their own words five different times in five different ways, all aimed at a public college audience. Choose a few student examples to show on the screen and have the class identify places that sound like the author and places where the author sounds like the teacher or someone else. Close the activity with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of parroting and a brief written reflection in which students identify how much they want to “sound like” themselves, someone else, or a mix of both in their next paper. The purpose of this activity isn’t to move students away from approximating others’ discourse but to help them become aware of how the process of navigating discourse expectations works and of the role that parroting of others’ language can play in it.

Another way to introduce critical discussion of voice in the classroom is to engage students in an investigation of accent. Our participant Thomas identified his student’s use of the word “foreigners” as evidence of her cultural and linguistic background, and he considered it a strong rhetorical choice for the meaning his student was attempting to convey despite the possible offensiveness of the term. Teachers can bring the subject of accent into the classroom by focusing a class meeting on the question, What rhetorical affordances are available to a writer based on the accent present in his or her writing? First, invite students to learn about someone’s experience of speaking English in ways that are heard as “accented” by others, such as by screening Safwat Saleem’s or Jamila Lyiscott’s TED Talk or by inviting a multilingual speaker to class to discuss his or her experiences (see Lyiscott; Saleem). Have students identify the aspects of this person’s language that can be considered an accent and discuss how that accent is received by others and the benefits it offers to this person’s speech. Next, have students pair up and read examples of each other’s everyday writing—such as text messages or posts on social media—and identify instances of accent. Students’ own accents may come through in use of words or concepts from other languages or cultures, use of slang or dialect, or different phrasings of words that signal students’ backgrounds or points of reference. Close the activity with a discussion in which students consider the benefits and drawbacks of accent in their own writing, and ensure that this discussion acknowledges cases in which speech or writing features are read as “accented” regardless of an author’s intent and cases in which accent can be a rhetorical choice in writing. By inviting students to identify and discuss “accented” instances in writing, this activity can prompt students to recognize nuance and value across language differences. Regardless of how many multilingual writers are in a course, discussing accent and language diversity will benefit all students, as all are likely to read texts written by multilingual authors in their college experiences or careers.

The ideas for classroom practice we discuss here emerge from our study findings, but we acknowledge that this study has limitations. The study presents a deep exploration into two faculty members’ reading of single pieces of their students’ writing. However, it is limited to the exploration of only these two faculty members, whom we asked to bring only one piece of student writing to the interview and protocol session. As such, this study includes a small sample size. Future work might include additional protocol analyses involving more faculty and shorter pieces of writing or perhaps the tracing of individual faculty members’ perception of voice longitudinally over time as they get to know students during the trajectory of a semester.

Within any discussions of voice in the classroom, as in responding to students’ writing, we see sensitivity to students’ positions as learners as key to facilitating students’ critical thought on this subject. Given that voice is often-discussed and complexly defined, we have an opportunity to demystify academic discourse conventions by entering into conversation on this complex subject with our students. By inviting students to wrestle with voice-related concepts like parroting and accent, we can make visible to students the many choices they make in constructing a voice on the page and can encourage students to think critically about the rhetorical affordances of those choices.

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