Cámara sin FIFO

Semi-structured interviews (baseline and end-of-course interviews)

Semi-structured, recorded interviews (Drever, 2003) were conducted in order to understand what their understanding was at the beginning of the course and how their understanding of voice changed (see Appendix B for the baseline and end-of-course interview protocols). The students were given the same interview protocols in the baseline and end-of-course interviews in order to trace the growth of their metacognitive knowledge of voice. The purpose of the

interviews was to examine how students understood the construct of voice and its

lexicogrammatical realizations in academic writing. The baseline interview sought to examine their knowledge of voice at the beginning of the course. Since knowledge of citations plays a critical role in academic writing (Feak & Swales, 2009), interview protocols asked them, for example, to identify voice and voice resources in summary and review texts (as shown below). In the summary text, the author only attributed to Kirp’s views (e.g., Kirp argues) without offering any evaluation. In the review text, the author used many evaluative language resources (e.g., clearly illuminates, powerful and enlightened, insightful) to evaluate Stiglitz’s views.

In the summary text, the prompt asked:

Here is a paragraph from a summary (show interviewee the text & interviewer read it aloud, slowly, student can read along). Can you identify the words or phrases the author uses to

signal that s/he is summarizing the views of someone else? Why and how did you identify these words/phrases?

The students read:

In Kirp’s article, he questions current views on educational reform. These views advocate

business and technology models as a cure for what ails public schools, such as high-stakes

evaluation of schools and teachers, incorporation of new technology and online learning.

Kirp argues that none of these solutions have worked because they all ignore the

importance of human interaction. He disagrees with these views and convincingly suggests

some viable and proven reforms and solutions for advancing student achievement.

In the review text, the prompt asked:

Here is a paragraph from a review of an article (show interviewee the text & interviewer read it aloud, slowly, student can read along). Can you identify the words or phrases the author uses to signal that s/he is expressing his/her own views as s/he evaluates the original piece? Why and how did you identify these words/phrases?

The students read:

In Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz challenges the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund, questioning their motives and their successes. As a Nobel

Prize winner and former chief economist of the World Bank, he clearly illuminates the

workings of these institutions. This makes his arguments powerful and enlightened. He

Students participating in interviews remained anonymous until the completion of the course. Six out of nine students spared extra time to participate in the interviews. My colleague audio- recorded the interviews and took notes as the participants were talking (each interview

approximately 40 minutes, totaling approximately 480 minutes).

Student reflections

The purpose of collecting oral and written reflections was to observe students’

developmental changes in the three types of metacognitive awareness. The students were given a reflective question in each period of class (54 oral and written student reflections in total). I audio-taped their oral reflections in groups (the same groups of text analysis task) and also collected their individual written responses to the reflective questions (see Appendix C). In their oral and written reflections, they reflected on their beliefs of voice, lexicogrammatical

realizations of voice, and rhetorical character of voice.

The baseline reflection question sought to examine their knowledge of voice. They first orally shared their own ideas with their group members and then individually wrote down their responses. The baseline reflection question asked the students: What is a voice in academic

writing? Can you give some examples to illustrate what you think? In the end of week 5 (end of

second class period), the reflection question asked the students: How would you define voice now?

Can you give some examples to illustrate what you think? The end-of-the-course reflection asked

Classroom group work on text analysis tasks

The purpose of audio-taping group work on text analysis tasks was to observe how students drew on the Engagement metalanguage to talk about voice and explore its meaning potential in academic texts. At the beginning of the first class, I orally explained to all the students why I was using the recorders in the classroom (to collect data only for my research purposes, which was irrelevant to how they were evaluated in this course) and what I was recording (to understand what they knew about voice and how they came to understand it). Then, I audio-taped each class session (using the first recorder), which was set up at the beginning of each class. At the

beginning of each group work on text analysis tasks, I placed a recorder in each group (using the first, second, and third recorders) to audio-tape students’ talk about voice as they were analyzing academic texts.

After teaching a specific part of Engagement scheme (e.g., neutral and evaluative voice), the nine students were divided into groups of three. Students were not required to stick to the same group members each week. So, some students tended to group together more often than others. In text analysis tasks (see Appendix D for all text analysis tasks), each student was given the same individual work sheet on which they saw the focal part of Engagement scheme and the tasks (example task sheet shown in Figure 3.1). They first analyzed the tasks in their own sheets and established their own interpretations before they shared them with other group members. To do text analysis tasks, the students were explicitly told to share and listen to others’

Figure 3.1. Example task sheet distributed to each student

The texts students analyzed in these episodes were authentic excerpts sourced from published journal articles in the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ) and the

academic journal sub-corpus of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2008-). In their text analysis tasks, I invited students to reflect on what voice was projected, what language resources contributed to a voice, and how and why such language resources resulted in the voice they identified.