- Email: [email protected]
Stance and voice in written academic genres
Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2014) 1e3
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of English for Academic Purposes journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap
Book review Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres, K. Hyland, C. Sancho Guinda (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (2012). p. 263, US$95.00/UK£ 55.00, ISBN: 978-0-230-30283-9
Ken Hyland and Carmen Sancho Guinda have collected a wide-ranging and interesting group of scholars to consider what they call ‘two of the most significant concepts in applied linguists today’ … but also ‘among the most contested and ambiguous’ (p. 1). Their own Introduction to the collection shows just how difficult it is to pin these terms down, in particular voice. Hyland and Sancho Guinda say “This book is therefore a collection of stances on stance-taking and the ways in which this may be voiced” (p. 2). An enticing sentence: but the use of ‘this’ following two plurals (‘stances’ and ‘ways’) seems to suggest the singular object refers to ‘collection’, yet that doesn't feel right. Thus we meet already the fluidity around the question about whether voice is itself singular or plural e a question this collection complexifies splendidly. The second and third chapters in the collection take on stance and voice separately. In Chapter 2, Bethany Gray and Doug Biber focus on stance, which they characterize as “the ways in which speakers and writers encode opinions and assessments in the language they produce” (p. 15). This simple definition, however, encompasses several partially-separate areas of research, including evidentiality, affect, hedging, evaluation, appraisal and stance. It becomes clear later in the chapter that most of these are part of some conceptual whole that might have been displayed as a framework or display of interrelationships: for example, on p. 17 we are told that evidentiality is ‘epistemic stance’ and affect is ‘attitudinal stance’. However, the conceptual coherence here is disturbed for me by the inclusion of “a third category to indicate ‘style of speaking’” which turns out to be “stance markers” (Bethany Gray and Doug Biber), for more information about which we are referred to other work by Biber, not in this collection. This chapter demonstrates the expertise of Biber and his corpus group in categorizing the linguistic elements of stance markers, but is less clear about how the messages about the author's attitude towards their subject matter and their audience are conveyeddperhaps because the authors are honestly reflecting the current shifting state and status of ‘knowledge’ around the concept and use of stance in academic writing. Then in the third chapter, Christine Tardy argues that voice is a “robust theoretical concept that has much to offer the study of academic discourse” (p. 46). Acknowledging the complexity of the concept, Tardy broadly views it as having three dimensions: the individual, the social, and the dialogic or interactional. The value for me in this chapter is Tardy's honest view of how slippery a term and concept this is, and that however one may attempt to lay it out, voice in text may shift from page to page, point to point. The case studies that Tardy uses illustrate strongly the dialogic nature of voice, by looking to readers'/reviewers' responses to academic texts for their perceptions and characterizations of voice. The rest of the book is divided into three sections: Part II of the book contains four chapters on stance and voice in professional genres; Part III looks at student genres; Part IV looks at academic discourse. However, I have chosen to discuss the chapters for what they can tell us about the shape and parameters of current views of each of these key aspects of text-making and textual interpretation, so I have moved between the parts of the book to follow the threads of each of these and, finally, I will attempt to bring them together. I felt that the first chapter of Part II (Chapter Four), by Susan Hood, might well have been in the first section, since it offers us a very different set of tools and terminology for thinking and talking about stance and voice. I suspect many JEAP readers are like me: relatively unfamiliar with Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory and practice, but gradually growing more familiar as it occurs more and more frequently in our professional reading. SFL has a very much more sophisticated and detailed logical and definitional structure for language, and as Hood says: “If we are to engage fruitfully in dialogue across different traditions of theory and method in explorations of evaluative meaning in discourses, then it is imperative that we do not assume that shared wordings mean shared theoretical constructs” (p. 67). It is perhaps not surprising that it is difficult to work out which of Hood's terms in SFL align precisely with stance and voice: it seems that voice is seen within register in SFL, while stance is a lower-order category indicating “constraints on configurations of appraisal that characterize text-types within a register. Chapter 5 by Polly Tse, looks at ‘stance in academic bios’; however, I found it difficult to identify Tse's stance on stance in this chapter, perhaps because this genre is constrained by length requirements and by the indeterminate yet very broad nature of its audience, so that space for stance expression is limited. Tse's comment that “the academic bio is essentially a http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2014.07.003
Please cite this article in press as: Hamp-Lyons, L., Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jeap.2014.07.003
2
Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2014) 1e3
form of stance-taking at the meta-level” (p. 83) rings true. Chapter Six by Alan Gross and Paula Chesley is a major contrast to all that has gone before, opening as it does with a medical example followed by discussion of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The collaboration between an expert on the rhetoric of science and rhetorical hermeneutics (Gross) and a corpus linguist/psycholinguist (Chesley) is interesting, but for me the two parts of this Chapter do not hang together coherently. Chesley's focus on hedging relates to only a (relatively minor) part of the interesting arguments put forward by Gross, leaving readers with the impression that hedging is the key component of stance. Although Paul Thompson's chapter title (Chapter 8) does not mention stance, we nevertheless find in his introduction a ‘three-level model’ which encompasses stance and voice (p. 119). He also gives a very simple generalisation (in relation specifically to PhD theses, but I believe, quite generalisable): “they must project a voice of individual expert authority through the developing text, and they must also position themselves in relation to their thesis subject and ultimately within a disciplinary community. They must, in sum, achieve both a distinct voice and a distinct stance” (p. 119: my Italics). Thompson arrives from a different direction at a similar conclusion to Hood: that stance is an aspect of voice. Ken Hyland's chapter (Chapter 9) moves the focus to undergraduate writing and here too we find a useful summary of his definition: “stance largely involves the writer's expression of personal attitudes and assessments of the status of knowledge in a text and voice, on the other hand, acknowledges the authorized ways of speaking as a community member” (p. 134). This is a rare Chapter in this book, and a rare treatment in the literature as a whole, that gives clear examples of both stance and voice; and this Chapter too closes with a cogent summary of how they are intertwined. The Chapter by Carmen Sancho Guinda (Chapter 11) on ‘proximal positioning’ leads me to expect a focus on stance in the paper, and overall this is the case, although the real focus is on a very specific and poorly-understood genre, commentary on graphs. Sancho Guinda points out that graph commentaries may be either what she calls ‘data transfer’, that is, reporting, or ‘data commentary’. Sancho Guinda has useful things to say about the nature of data commentary and its complexity for second language university students, in particular the identification through her data of the difficulty undergraduate students have with managing both stance and voice in the same task. What I take from Chapter 12 by Ann Hewings on ‘Stance and voice in academic discourse across channels’ is the inherent intended-interactivity in both stance and voice; and that because stance, although difficult, is the more teachable of the two, it usually comes first in written genres, whereas voice seems to emerge more easily in blogs and other screen-based media. Clearly, there is a huge gap in the research around how learners understand and create their own voice, and how they earn the right to create and express their own stance in digital media. In contrast, I found the paper by Kjersti Fløttum (Chapter 14) quite amorphous and did not extract a central argument from it unless it be that more research on the features of “linguistic and disciplinary standardization… and central [to this] are the traces of voice and stance” (p. 229) is needed. In my search for separability and clarity I now turn to the Chapters that focus mainly on voice. I have already mentioned Chapter Six, by Alan Gross and Paula Chesley but I found one of their comments, and the following closing section, very interesting. They speak of hedging as ‘a component of the voice of science… a voice that persuades so well because it is generated by a set of social norms for scientific conduct’ (p. 97) and they go on in that final section to focus on the ethics of research reporting in the biomedical field because of the commercial influence of the pharmaceutical industry. This article fascinates me as it is a rare example of a linguistic measure being used in hard science contexts; but it does not convince me that hedging is a part of voice: the data seem to me to reflect clear cases of conscious stance-taking. Chapter 7, by Marina Bondi, looks at ‘voice in textbooks’. Bondi begins by showing that the use of voice by expert writers is extremely wide and includes audience awareness and the implicit as well explicit ‘inclusion’ of the reader; however, her chapter focuses on how textbook authors construct their professional identities discursively. Bondi returns to a claim often made, that textbooks “seem to conceal the argumentative nature of disciplinary knowledge” by suggesting that the field of study consists of “a well-established set of facts and theories” rather than using references to the primary literature and by avoiding hedging (p. 113). Working with two corpora, one a set of 30 history textbook chapters and a comparison corpus of 2.5 million words (not identified in the chapter), Bondi first suggests that history differs in some significant ways from discourse tendencies found in both hard and soft sciences. She goes on to look at what she calls positive keywords (expected words more present in textbook chapters than articles) and negative keywords (expected words more present in journal articles than textbook chapters) and finds striking differences, especially in the frequency of self-reference and explicitly evaluative elements in articles compared to textbooks. Bondi suggests that the voice of the ‘Recounter’ (the telling of facts and narrative) is dominant in textbooks. Chapter 11 by Paul Kei Matsuda and Jill Jeffrey is interesting for the different approach it takes to thinking about voice, positioning it within the rhetoric and writing community rather than the academic writing community. This inevitably gives their chapter a political slant, as is common with writing research and writing about writing instruction in the US: the commodification of ‘advanced literacy’ inevitably leads to an emphasis on assessment and on institutional expectations and constraints. Thus, Matsuda and Jeffrey focus on curriculum and assessment rubrics, arguing that the presence of voice, and the kinds of voice exhibited, are much influenced by these documents. Looking into some key rubrics used in US secondary and post-secondary education they find that the concept of voice is often missingdand more often in ESL assessments, and that in fact it is becoming less common. The other Chapters that focus on voice, by Marc Silver (Chapter 13) and Françoise Salager-Meyer, María Angeles Alcaraz ~ Ariza and Marianelo Luzardo Briceno (Chapter 15) look at disciplinary contexts. Although Silver's chapter is titled ‘Voice and stance across disciplines in academic discourse’, his chapter focuses on voice, and how it operates and varies across three Please cite this article in press as: Hamp-Lyons, L., Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jeap.2014.07.003
Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2014) 1e3
3
disciplines: he studies research article introductions in microbiology, the history of science, and art history. Silver describes considerable differences between the kinds of voice in the three disciplines, but unfortunately his chapter offers only a few examples by which readers might consider the strength of his position. Conversely, chapter 15 by Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza ~ o, which approaches voice in medical book reviews diachronically, focuses on the periods 1890e1900, 1950e1960, and Bricen and 2000e2010. The chapter provides data description and analysis using both principal components analysis (statistics) and close, detailed readings of the texts. Their finding that these book reviews were longer, textually more varied, and more critical of the work reviewed at the end of the nineteenth century, and that the authorial voice of the reviewer was more ‘visible’, is very interesting. The final chapter, the ‘epilogue’, by Deborah Cameron is itself an example of a very well-known voice considering its stance on the issues discussed in the book. Cameron reminds us that even some very highly-skilled writers of English as a second language may choose to retain their own voice, and argues that “there is still space for writers to negotiate their own positions, and to be shapers … of the discourse they inherit” (p. 256). The book as a whole is a fascinating collection, and it has some outstanding chapters, but it leaves me only a little clearer about whether voice and stance are the same thing, two things or parts of a greater thing. On balance, and with the proviso that this can only apply to skilled writers, I would agree with Silver that “stance and engagement [are mechanisms that] create a dominant but credible voice in the text” (p. 204). Liz Hamp-Lyons CRELLA, University of Bedfordshire, UK E-mail address: [email protected]
Please cite this article in press as: Hamp-Lyons, L., Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jeap.2014.07.003
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of English for Academic Purposes journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap
Book review Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres, K. Hyland, C. Sancho Guinda (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (2012). p. 263, US$95.00/UK£ 55.00, ISBN: 978-0-230-30283-9
Ken Hyland and Carmen Sancho Guinda have collected a wide-ranging and interesting group of scholars to consider what they call ‘two of the most significant concepts in applied linguists today’ … but also ‘among the most contested and ambiguous’ (p. 1). Their own Introduction to the collection shows just how difficult it is to pin these terms down, in particular voice. Hyland and Sancho Guinda say “This book is therefore a collection of stances on stance-taking and the ways in which this may be voiced” (p. 2). An enticing sentence: but the use of ‘this’ following two plurals (‘stances’ and ‘ways’) seems to suggest the singular object refers to ‘collection’, yet that doesn't feel right. Thus we meet already the fluidity around the question about whether voice is itself singular or plural e a question this collection complexifies splendidly. The second and third chapters in the collection take on stance and voice separately. In Chapter 2, Bethany Gray and Doug Biber focus on stance, which they characterize as “the ways in which speakers and writers encode opinions and assessments in the language they produce” (p. 15). This simple definition, however, encompasses several partially-separate areas of research, including evidentiality, affect, hedging, evaluation, appraisal and stance. It becomes clear later in the chapter that most of these are part of some conceptual whole that might have been displayed as a framework or display of interrelationships: for example, on p. 17 we are told that evidentiality is ‘epistemic stance’ and affect is ‘attitudinal stance’. However, the conceptual coherence here is disturbed for me by the inclusion of “a third category to indicate ‘style of speaking’” which turns out to be “stance markers” (Bethany Gray and Doug Biber), for more information about which we are referred to other work by Biber, not in this collection. This chapter demonstrates the expertise of Biber and his corpus group in categorizing the linguistic elements of stance markers, but is less clear about how the messages about the author's attitude towards their subject matter and their audience are conveyeddperhaps because the authors are honestly reflecting the current shifting state and status of ‘knowledge’ around the concept and use of stance in academic writing. Then in the third chapter, Christine Tardy argues that voice is a “robust theoretical concept that has much to offer the study of academic discourse” (p. 46). Acknowledging the complexity of the concept, Tardy broadly views it as having three dimensions: the individual, the social, and the dialogic or interactional. The value for me in this chapter is Tardy's honest view of how slippery a term and concept this is, and that however one may attempt to lay it out, voice in text may shift from page to page, point to point. The case studies that Tardy uses illustrate strongly the dialogic nature of voice, by looking to readers'/reviewers' responses to academic texts for their perceptions and characterizations of voice. The rest of the book is divided into three sections: Part II of the book contains four chapters on stance and voice in professional genres; Part III looks at student genres; Part IV looks at academic discourse. However, I have chosen to discuss the chapters for what they can tell us about the shape and parameters of current views of each of these key aspects of text-making and textual interpretation, so I have moved between the parts of the book to follow the threads of each of these and, finally, I will attempt to bring them together. I felt that the first chapter of Part II (Chapter Four), by Susan Hood, might well have been in the first section, since it offers us a very different set of tools and terminology for thinking and talking about stance and voice. I suspect many JEAP readers are like me: relatively unfamiliar with Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory and practice, but gradually growing more familiar as it occurs more and more frequently in our professional reading. SFL has a very much more sophisticated and detailed logical and definitional structure for language, and as Hood says: “If we are to engage fruitfully in dialogue across different traditions of theory and method in explorations of evaluative meaning in discourses, then it is imperative that we do not assume that shared wordings mean shared theoretical constructs” (p. 67). It is perhaps not surprising that it is difficult to work out which of Hood's terms in SFL align precisely with stance and voice: it seems that voice is seen within register in SFL, while stance is a lower-order category indicating “constraints on configurations of appraisal that characterize text-types within a register. Chapter 5 by Polly Tse, looks at ‘stance in academic bios’; however, I found it difficult to identify Tse's stance on stance in this chapter, perhaps because this genre is constrained by length requirements and by the indeterminate yet very broad nature of its audience, so that space for stance expression is limited. Tse's comment that “the academic bio is essentially a http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2014.07.003
Please cite this article in press as: Hamp-Lyons, L., Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jeap.2014.07.003
2
Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2014) 1e3
form of stance-taking at the meta-level” (p. 83) rings true. Chapter Six by Alan Gross and Paula Chesley is a major contrast to all that has gone before, opening as it does with a medical example followed by discussion of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The collaboration between an expert on the rhetoric of science and rhetorical hermeneutics (Gross) and a corpus linguist/psycholinguist (Chesley) is interesting, but for me the two parts of this Chapter do not hang together coherently. Chesley's focus on hedging relates to only a (relatively minor) part of the interesting arguments put forward by Gross, leaving readers with the impression that hedging is the key component of stance. Although Paul Thompson's chapter title (Chapter 8) does not mention stance, we nevertheless find in his introduction a ‘three-level model’ which encompasses stance and voice (p. 119). He also gives a very simple generalisation (in relation specifically to PhD theses, but I believe, quite generalisable): “they must project a voice of individual expert authority through the developing text, and they must also position themselves in relation to their thesis subject and ultimately within a disciplinary community. They must, in sum, achieve both a distinct voice and a distinct stance” (p. 119: my Italics). Thompson arrives from a different direction at a similar conclusion to Hood: that stance is an aspect of voice. Ken Hyland's chapter (Chapter 9) moves the focus to undergraduate writing and here too we find a useful summary of his definition: “stance largely involves the writer's expression of personal attitudes and assessments of the status of knowledge in a text and voice, on the other hand, acknowledges the authorized ways of speaking as a community member” (p. 134). This is a rare Chapter in this book, and a rare treatment in the literature as a whole, that gives clear examples of both stance and voice; and this Chapter too closes with a cogent summary of how they are intertwined. The Chapter by Carmen Sancho Guinda (Chapter 11) on ‘proximal positioning’ leads me to expect a focus on stance in the paper, and overall this is the case, although the real focus is on a very specific and poorly-understood genre, commentary on graphs. Sancho Guinda points out that graph commentaries may be either what she calls ‘data transfer’, that is, reporting, or ‘data commentary’. Sancho Guinda has useful things to say about the nature of data commentary and its complexity for second language university students, in particular the identification through her data of the difficulty undergraduate students have with managing both stance and voice in the same task. What I take from Chapter 12 by Ann Hewings on ‘Stance and voice in academic discourse across channels’ is the inherent intended-interactivity in both stance and voice; and that because stance, although difficult, is the more teachable of the two, it usually comes first in written genres, whereas voice seems to emerge more easily in blogs and other screen-based media. Clearly, there is a huge gap in the research around how learners understand and create their own voice, and how they earn the right to create and express their own stance in digital media. In contrast, I found the paper by Kjersti Fløttum (Chapter 14) quite amorphous and did not extract a central argument from it unless it be that more research on the features of “linguistic and disciplinary standardization… and central [to this] are the traces of voice and stance” (p. 229) is needed. In my search for separability and clarity I now turn to the Chapters that focus mainly on voice. I have already mentioned Chapter Six, by Alan Gross and Paula Chesley but I found one of their comments, and the following closing section, very interesting. They speak of hedging as ‘a component of the voice of science… a voice that persuades so well because it is generated by a set of social norms for scientific conduct’ (p. 97) and they go on in that final section to focus on the ethics of research reporting in the biomedical field because of the commercial influence of the pharmaceutical industry. This article fascinates me as it is a rare example of a linguistic measure being used in hard science contexts; but it does not convince me that hedging is a part of voice: the data seem to me to reflect clear cases of conscious stance-taking. Chapter 7, by Marina Bondi, looks at ‘voice in textbooks’. Bondi begins by showing that the use of voice by expert writers is extremely wide and includes audience awareness and the implicit as well explicit ‘inclusion’ of the reader; however, her chapter focuses on how textbook authors construct their professional identities discursively. Bondi returns to a claim often made, that textbooks “seem to conceal the argumentative nature of disciplinary knowledge” by suggesting that the field of study consists of “a well-established set of facts and theories” rather than using references to the primary literature and by avoiding hedging (p. 113). Working with two corpora, one a set of 30 history textbook chapters and a comparison corpus of 2.5 million words (not identified in the chapter), Bondi first suggests that history differs in some significant ways from discourse tendencies found in both hard and soft sciences. She goes on to look at what she calls positive keywords (expected words more present in textbook chapters than articles) and negative keywords (expected words more present in journal articles than textbook chapters) and finds striking differences, especially in the frequency of self-reference and explicitly evaluative elements in articles compared to textbooks. Bondi suggests that the voice of the ‘Recounter’ (the telling of facts and narrative) is dominant in textbooks. Chapter 11 by Paul Kei Matsuda and Jill Jeffrey is interesting for the different approach it takes to thinking about voice, positioning it within the rhetoric and writing community rather than the academic writing community. This inevitably gives their chapter a political slant, as is common with writing research and writing about writing instruction in the US: the commodification of ‘advanced literacy’ inevitably leads to an emphasis on assessment and on institutional expectations and constraints. Thus, Matsuda and Jeffrey focus on curriculum and assessment rubrics, arguing that the presence of voice, and the kinds of voice exhibited, are much influenced by these documents. Looking into some key rubrics used in US secondary and post-secondary education they find that the concept of voice is often missingdand more often in ESL assessments, and that in fact it is becoming less common. The other Chapters that focus on voice, by Marc Silver (Chapter 13) and Françoise Salager-Meyer, María Angeles Alcaraz ~ Ariza and Marianelo Luzardo Briceno (Chapter 15) look at disciplinary contexts. Although Silver's chapter is titled ‘Voice and stance across disciplines in academic discourse’, his chapter focuses on voice, and how it operates and varies across three Please cite this article in press as: Hamp-Lyons, L., Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jeap.2014.07.003
Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2014) 1e3
3
disciplines: he studies research article introductions in microbiology, the history of science, and art history. Silver describes considerable differences between the kinds of voice in the three disciplines, but unfortunately his chapter offers only a few examples by which readers might consider the strength of his position. Conversely, chapter 15 by Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza ~ o, which approaches voice in medical book reviews diachronically, focuses on the periods 1890e1900, 1950e1960, and Bricen and 2000e2010. The chapter provides data description and analysis using both principal components analysis (statistics) and close, detailed readings of the texts. Their finding that these book reviews were longer, textually more varied, and more critical of the work reviewed at the end of the nineteenth century, and that the authorial voice of the reviewer was more ‘visible’, is very interesting. The final chapter, the ‘epilogue’, by Deborah Cameron is itself an example of a very well-known voice considering its stance on the issues discussed in the book. Cameron reminds us that even some very highly-skilled writers of English as a second language may choose to retain their own voice, and argues that “there is still space for writers to negotiate their own positions, and to be shapers … of the discourse they inherit” (p. 256). The book as a whole is a fascinating collection, and it has some outstanding chapters, but it leaves me only a little clearer about whether voice and stance are the same thing, two things or parts of a greater thing. On balance, and with the proviso that this can only apply to skilled writers, I would agree with Silver that “stance and engagement [are mechanisms that] create a dominant but credible voice in the text” (p. 204). Liz Hamp-Lyons CRELLA, University of Bedfordshire, UK E-mail address: [email protected]
Please cite this article in press as: Hamp-Lyons, L., Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jeap.2014.07.003