Second Language Writers Coming Into Voice

As we learned from all three of these readings this week – as well as readings in the weeks prior – writing is both a social and a cultural activity. Thus, L2 writers – who inherently possess identities and voices in their L1 society and culture as writers – find themselves having to negotiate to find their voices in their L2. As writers in a non-native language, in a non-native culture, they must find their space as composers in their L2.

Ivanic and Camps speak of “voice types,” which refer to the many different ways in which a writer situates him/herself with ideas (ideational positioning), with him/herself and the audience (interpersonal positioning), and with the text he/she is composing (textual positioning). Ivanic and Camps go into great detail when analyzing the syntactical and lexiconic choices the six Mexican graduate students in their study make in their academic writing, as Ivanic and Camps assert that these linguistic choices carry positioning value in how writers construct voice. These students – as all L2 writers have to do to at least some extent – have to construct their identities as writers in their L2.

One of the positioning consequences of these students’ syntactical and lexiconic choices involves values regarding how knowledge is produced. Ivanic and Camps explain that writers demonstrate their beliefs about the production of knowledge in how they create space for knowledge, to whom they attribute knowledge, and how they make that attribution in their text. Writers will discuss knowledge in a way that hits somewhere on a continuum between knowledge as subjective and situated in local experience to knowledge as objective and universally true (18). Upon this continuum, composing choices may demonstrate knowledge as impersonal, or the writer may give agency through actively crediting those who participate in the creation of a certain knowledge. In addition, authors can recognize their own agency (however, as Ivanic and Camps admit, this choice risks the author appearing as asocial) (19). Ivanic and Camps use as an example an assignment by Germán, who variably positions himself within the same assignment; at one point, he gives attribution to the researcher he is crediting with knowledge, while at another he references himself as evaluator, and later he positions himself as constructor (20).

One interesting aspect of this article I’d like to touch on is that of appropriation. On page 24, the authors quote Evodia as saying that she will give her instructors what they want; she will create texts as they tell her to do. However, when she gets a chance to express herself, she will take it. Ivanic and Camps discuss this as a reticence to taking authority in her writing. I can truly see how this is an issue of power with an L2 writer, but I can also position L1 composition students in this same situation, especially when the audience is an academic or instructor whom we think or assume knows more than we do. Admittedly, though, it is more complex for an L2 writer to create authorial presence than an L1 writer. Thus, when earlier in the article Yamile is – as Ivanic and Camps put it – “positioned by the discourse,” absorbing “the way” in which her voice should sound in her writing, she is perhaps being appropriated by those she’s attempting to imitate – or please.

Ivanic and Camps state that “’identity’ is typically not unitary but multiple, and hence texts are often polyphonic, or many-voiced” (30). I would go so far as to say that they are then also intertextual, as our voices as writers are complex amalgams of everything we’ve previously written or read. Thus, reading academic articles in an L2 is a common technique L2 writers employ when attempting to create their voice or identity in the discourse of their L2. What I love about the article by Hirvela and Belcher is that they use the term “architecture of voice” to describe the dimensions of a writer’s composing self. The terminology echoes the concept that a writer’s many voices are constructed through the interplay of culture, discourse, genre, self-representation, and other factors. Hirvela and Belcer remind us that L2 writers are not voiceless; they possess a set of L1 voices, and usually are very successful, confident writers in their L1. They already have the experience of “being,” of positioning themselves as an author within a rhetorical situation, and we cannot forget these writers’ “life histories,” as Ivanic calls them (Hirvela and Belcher 89). They are multilingual writers already owning at least one writerly voice, and an academic voice in their L2 (in this case, English) can simply be an extension of their existing writerly selves. Thus, as Hirvela and Belcher wish L2 composition teachers to view this as a process rather than a product, they invoke Cummins’ idea of “voicing”:  the activity of engaging with their L2 academic community in their discourse field.

The three case studies in Hirvela and Belcher’s article remind me of my “writing buddy.” As Hirvela and Belcher note (citing Peter Elbow), “’we do no favor to L2 students who want to prosper in an individualistic culture’ by denying them the opportunity to acquire those elements of ‘academese,” which lead to success as writers within that culture and which they actively seek” (Elbow qtd. in Hirvela and Belcher 98). As my writing buddy wants to be a successful academic writer in his L2 (English), he will need to construct part of his identity to accommodate those elements into his voice toolbox– to come into his own voice in his L2 writing. Thus by reading about the voicing process (as expounded upon in the three articles we read this week), perhaps I can help guide my writing buddy toward developing his own identity as a scientific writer in English. However, I have to be careful in generalizing too much, as Hirvela and Belcher remind us that “it is difficult to generalize about NNS university students with respect to voice when they bring such widely varying backgrounds to the voice equation” (104). So, in applying this week’s concepts on voice to my own project, I will begin this week diving deeper into my writing buddy’s background: his L1 voices, including his strengths and weaknesses composing in his L1.

In Shen’s article, I appreciated that he dove so deeply into the history of Chinese composition (he references to a time two-thousand years ago). And, I especially like his conclusion at then end, that when he composes in English he feels as if he is “slipping into a new ‘skin’” (132). His explanation of why Chinese writers write the way they do (generally, although we have to be careful that we don’t generalize too much) is helpful, as it causes me to wonder how my writing buddy’s L1 composition might have similarly entrenched roots calling for a varied rhetorical form.