On the notion of "voice"

This week’s readings on voice are thought provoking. Not only had I to rethink the concept of voice, but I also had to revisit and reflect on how I voiced myself to be heard by others, hear others’ voices-especially my students by willingly encourage them to have a presence in their writing, or inadvertently hinder the emergence and development of their voice.

Yet, I should make clear what I mean by voice. Being an EFL teacher and teacher-educator, I have always been cautious when discussing the intricate issue of voice in teaching L2 writing. As I already mentioned in a previous blog entry on the CR/IC rhetoric, when addressing the L2 students’ voice we should not consider them as having no voice. These students have an already existing voice in their L1 and if they are multilingual students, they may have more than one voice.

In his reflections and refractions on voice, Atkinson acknowledges the fact that voice is a complex concept. In English L1composition studies, it has its origins in the “dominant communicative ideology that disadvantages or excludes students who are not party to it.” This statement by Atkinson shows clearly that voice taken from this ideological perspective clearly advantages students who have a specific cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu, 1977). In English L1 composition classes, non mainstream students who have a habitus that is not compatible with that required by the school will be disadvantaged. That is, voice among other things might have been already developed at home as part of the child’s linguistic socialization and not at school. In the same vein, L2 students who are required to compose in English and “display” their voice may be disadvantaged too because within the concept of voice there are cultural differences. Besides, voice has different meanings and definitions. Matsuda (2001) defines voice in Japanese in relation to the effects writing has on the readership and shows how Nanae had different voices depending on the personas she articulated. In other words, she had multiple voices as a worker, wife …

Another important aspect that is worth considering is that there are different linguistic resources to achieve voice in different languages. For instance, an L2 learner may be used to “display” voice in the L1 via a specific linguistic medium, and when shifting to English as a L2 may fail to recognize the linguistic media English use to “display” voice. One may consider the difference between the use of “I” and the effect it produces, for instance, in different languages. In this particular instance, I can recall the use of the pronoun “we” in Arabic and the effect it produces and which is more powerful than the pronoun “I”. Yet as an English L2 user, I am very much aware of the difference the use of “I” vs. “we” makes in English composition, and as such I try to achieve more effect by using “I” because I have to function in English with and within a particular mindset. Finally, the use of “I” is but one example in the discussion of how to achieve voice in second language writing. I use “I” as long as I am comfortable using it.