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Voice Construction, Assessment, and Extra-Textual Identity
- Source: Research in the Teaching of English, Volume 47, Issue 1, Aug 2012, p. 64 - 99
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- 01 Aug 2012
Abstract
The concept of voice has long attracted the attention of teachers, but more recently has also been the focus of a growing body of research aiming to understand voice as self-representation in writing. Adopting a socio-cultural orientation to voice, studies have revealed much about how textual choices are used by readers to build images of text-authors; however, such research has been limited to contexts in which the author’s actual identity is unknown by the reader. Research has offered limited insight into how an author’s embodied self figures into readers’ voice construction, or how voice construction is connected to readers’ assessments of text—with or without knowledge of the author’s identity apart from the text. This article takes up these issues by exploring how readers’ exposure to videos of two second language (L2) student-authors influenced voice construction and evaluation of the students’ papers. Through primarily qualitative and intertextual analysis, the study concludes that voice construction, extra-textual identity, and assessment are related and interacting constructs, though these relationships are neither straightforward nor predictable. Methodological, pedagogical, and theoretical implications of this conclusion are discussed