The study investigates how oral feedback exchange on writing, an often-used classroom pedagogy, can facilitate dialogic voice construction. The participants were twelve graduate students attending group writing conferences for thesis writing. The findings highlight the role that dialogic interactions play during both writing conferences and revising activities.
Recent scholarship seems to agree that voice in academic writing should be understood as socially and dialogically produced rather than as personal and individual. Voice construction, therefore, requires ongoing discourse acquisition and social activity through writing. However, voice studies situated in classrooms are lacking (Tardy, 2016), and how classroom activities can afford to facilitate discourse acquisition is yet to be explored. To fill this gap, the study investigates how oral feedback exchange on writing, an often-used classroom pedagogy, can facilitate dialogic voice construction. The participants were twelve graduate students in writing conference groups organized by the learning centre at an Australian university. The groups met fortnightly with a facilitator for one semester. The main activity during the conference was oral feedback exchange on each other’s writing. Taking an ethnographic case study approach, the data were collected through observation and audio-recordings of writing conferences, interviews with the students and the facilitators, and the students’ written drafts. Dialogic voice construction is investigated through the lens of activity systems (Engeström, 2001), focusing on the rules writers follow and the division of labour during both the writing conferences and the revising activity. The findings highlight the role that dialogic interactions play during writing conferences for voice construction. Through experiencing disciplinary rules, supervisors’ voice, and diverse social identities enacted during the oral feedback exchanges, the writers reflected on their positions in the thesis writing game and found a ‘new’ voice. Our study also sheds new light on the dialogic interactions in revising activities. Revising activities provide a space and time for writers to engage in social activities as they navigate the feedback they have received and consider how they may appropriate the words of others into ‘their own’ voice. Based on the findings, specific pedagogies for writing conferences will be discussed.
