This project sought to explore the question of voice in academic writing by going beyond the PhD student writer and their texts to arguably the most central figure in the surrounding discourse - that of the supervisor. Drawing on a Bakhtinian orientation to voice – dialogic of the individual and social dimensions – voice in this study was viewed as located in the text-mediated interaction between writer and reader. Such an approach not only acknowledges the highly situated nature of academic voice, but also the variation that may arise within as well as across disciplines.
The readers in this study were five experienced PhD supervisors in the broad field of Linguistics/Applied Linguistics. The texts were extracts of thesis drafts from three multilingual PhD students in this same broad field. In the study, the supervisors were asked to read and identify salient features of voice in each text, and then describe their responses to the texts in an interview. An analysis of the interview discourse revealed that there was consensus on the importance of voice. However, the cluster of features and practices identified as associated with an authoritative voice varied substantially amongst the five supervisors. What was interesting was that the supervisors’ “indexical biographies” (Blommaert & Horner, 2107) – their personal histories, academic writing experiences, areas of expertise – clearly shaped their awareness of voice and their voice preferences. Building on Canagarajah’s (2015) ‘pedagogy of voice’, we argue in this paper that in order to understand voice, equal weight needs to be given to readers’ roles, identities, subjectivities and awareness as to writers’. This leads us to conclude that in order to provide useful guidance to students, supervisors need to be aware of their own academic voices and how these have developed.
Blommaert, J. & Horner, B. (2017). Mobility and academic literacies: An epistolary conversation. London Review of Education, 15(1), 1-20.
Canagarajah, S. (2015). ‘Blessed in my own way’: Pedagogical affordances for dialogical voice construction in multilingual student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 27, 122-139.
