Voices in text, mind, and society

Journal of Second Language Writing 10 (2001) 55 ± 81

Voices in text, mind, and society Sociohistoric accounts of discourse acquisition and use Paul Prior* Department of English, University of Illinois, 608 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Abstract Voice is often represented either expressively as personal and individualistic or socially as a discourse system. Drawing on sociohistoric theory (particularly Voloshinov and Bakhtin), in this article, I argue for a third view in which voice is simultaneously personal and social because discourse is understood as fundamentally historical, situated, and indexical. Specifically, I explore three key ways that voice may be understood from this perspective: voice as a typification linked to social identities; voice as the reenvoicing of others' words in texts (oral and written) through processes of repetition and presupposition; and finally, voice as it is linked to the situated production of persons and social formations. All three are central to discourse acquisition and use in general and to literate activity in particular. Finally, I conclude by considering the implications of this theoretical perspective for second language writing pedagogies. D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Writing (composition); Writing research; Second language learning; Discourse analysis; Language acquisition

. . .there are no voiceless words that belong to no one. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 124)

* Tel.: +1-217-333-4346; fax: +1-217-333-4321. E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Prior). 1060-3743/01/$ ± see front matter D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 0 6 0 - 3 7 4 3 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 3 7 - 0

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1. Introduction In the last several years, a debate has developed around the value of certain composition pedagogies for NNES students, whether in ESL or L1 composition courses. One of the key terms around which this debate has been centered is voice. Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999) and Ramanathan and Kaplan (1996) have argued that voice is a distinctive marker of an expressivist ideology that favors L1 students, especially those from educated, middle- or upper-class backgrounds.1 Ramanathan and Atkinson see voice as marking a commitment to a certain culturally valued model of the Western self (i.e., an assertive individual who displays originality and skepticism). They suggest that this romantic ideology is deeply entangled with composition pedagogies that emphasize student ownership of texts, implicit learning, nondirective teaching, and student discovery of ideas and form through processes of reflection and revision. Johns (1999) implies that this whole pedagogical package is cruelly unfair to L2 students, that it amounts to an exclusionary practice. The alternative pedagogies that Ramanathan, Kaplan, Atkinson, and Johns offer are rooted in sociolinguistic notions of discourse communities. They emphasize initiating students into the practices, genres, and conventions of academic and disciplinary writing, involve more teacher-directed and explicit instruction, and generally call for classroom practices that are consonant with the cultural ideologies students already hold. In response to Ramanathan and Kaplan (1996), Raimes and Zamel (1997) questioned the validity of their representations of students, teachers, and pedagogies, arguing that their descriptive terms (e.g., explicit vs. implicit) were not carefully defined and that their representations were questionable generalizations, not grounded in careful research. In response to Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999), Elbow (1999) questioned their broad generalizations about the field, somewhat loosely defined terms, and particularly, the accuracy of their characterizations of his pedagogy. While Elbow accepted the basic claim that some ESL students might have problems with classes grounded in individualistic ideologies, he suggested that those problems would reflect the broad socialization of the teachers rather than any specific pedagogical practice or term. Finally, Elbow referred to the multiple meanings he sees for voice (Elbow, 1994), suggesting that Ramanathan and Atkinson had not fully acknowledged the complexity of his own arguments. There are a number of pedagogical issues that this debate has raised, only a few of which I will turn to in Section 6 of this paper. However, my first and main concern here is to take up the question of voice because it seems to me that the arguments on both sides of this debate have been framed around a set of shared views about voice, particularly a sharp binary of the personal and social, and

1 It should be noted that notions of voice have also been controversial, for similar reasons, within L1 composition circles. See, for example, Bowden (1999) and Harris (1997).

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because I believe that other ways of understanding voice, of figuring the relations between the personal and the social, could be useful to theory, research, and pedagogy for second language writing. My main goal here then is to explore an alternative understanding of voice and to follow out its implications for a general theory of discourse acquisition and use. Central to this article is a larger argument that suggests writing must always be understood as literate activity: Usual representations of writing collapse time, isolate persons, and filter activity (e.g., ``I wrote the paper over the weekend''). Actually writing happens in moments that are richly equipped with tools (material and semiotic) and populated with others (past, present, and future). When seen as situated activity, writing does not stand alone as the discrete act of a writer, but emerges as a confluence of many streams of activity: reading, talking, observing, acting, making, thinking, and feeling as well as transcribing words on paper. (Prior, 1998, p. xi)

I will largely take this notion of literate activity for granted here (see Prior, 1998 for a fuller explanation). In this article, I first argue that Bakhtinian and other sociohistoric perspectives on discourse Ð perspectives grounded in dialogic and situated notions of voice, utterance, and genre Ð offer a radical alternative to structuralist notions of languages as systems of words, rules, and worlds. Then I explore in some detail three senses in which voice can be understood from this perspective. Finally, I consider a few key implications of this theoretical perspective for second language writing pedagogies. 2. Is voice personal or social? Rereading Voloshinov Displaying the two poles of the debate and his own position, Harris (1997, p. 34) offers the following comments in an essay on voice: Instead of starting with the idea that personal voice comes from within, from ``a chest cavity unique in size and shape'' [Elbow, 1981, pp. 281 ± 282], we need to begin with the idea that our culture speaks to us through many competing voices, among them those of the home, school, neighborhood, and place of worship, of work and leisure, childhood and parenting, youth and age, friendship and love, individualism and community, of nation, gender, class, and race, as well as those of the various fields and methods that make up our ways of knowing. We need to think, that is, of a voice as a way of speaking that lies outside a writer, and which she must struggle to appropriate or control. Her voice as a writer will come out of the stance she takes toward these other social codes and voices, in the ways she makes use of the languages and methods of her field and culture.

Here Harris constructs the choice between a notion of voice as personal expression of the self coming from within, and as social ways of speaking that come from outside the person. Although Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999) suggest that voice is simply too saturated with cultural associations of Western

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individualism to be reappropriated as a social term, they construct the same basic choice. I would argue that the apparently conflicting perspectives, seating language either inside or outside the person, rest on common ground. It may seem odd to suggest that proponents of personal voice and social discourse are operating on any shared theoretical grounds; however, the basic assumption can be seen in Saussure's (1959) accounts of langue and parole. With langue, we have a socially shared code impressed on each individual. With parole, we have a unique speaking event. While Saussure privileged the social code over situated expression, if we reverse that privileging, we have the essence of an expressivist account. Since sociolinguistic theories have typically been represented as the radical opposition, it may also seem odd to associate proponents of discourse communities with the Saussure ± Chomsky line on competence and performance. However, as I have argued (Prior, 1998), discourse and speech community approaches represent only a partial break with Saussurian models of national languages. What the ethnography of communication and other alternative traditions have typically done are: (1) to broaden the objects of study and (2) to shrink, or Balkanize, the jurisdiction of discourse governments. For example, Hymes (1974) proposed broadening Chomsky's (1965) emphasis on abstract rules of form for linguistic competence to consider rules of use for communicative competence while also shifting down from nationallinguistic domains (like English) to more localized, multi-repertoire speech communities. Gee (1990) further expands the objects of study with his notion of Discourses as ways of saying ±being ±acting± thinking ±feeling± valuing and further shrinks the size of discourse governments (e.g., with his Discourse for biker bars). Although sociolinguistic research produced under the theoretical paradigm of discourse communities has achieved much, it continues to assume that there is some level where the shared rules and knowledge that make up communicative competence unproblematically govern performance. Variation then can only emerge from three sources: error, different levels of expertise, and competing community norms (whether between or within participants). For example, Harris, in the quote above, locates the individuality of a person's voice (its variation from others) in the stances the person takes toward other voices, i.e., in specific patterns of use (and nonuse) of those external, given voices. Voloshinov (1973) identified two dominant approaches to the study of language: individualistic subjectivism and abstract objectivism. Linking individualistic subjectivism to Humboldt and romanticism, Voloshinov described this position as one that sees language as generative activity; sees creative, meaningful speech acts of the individual as the heart of language; and sees the readymade system of language as ``the inert crust, the hardened lava of language creativity'' (p. 48). Linking abstract objectivism especially to Saussure, philology, and rationalism, Voloshinov described the second position as

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one that views language as a readymade stable system of normatively identical forms, as an autonomous domain, a closed system independent of ideological and cognitive systems. In this view, he continues, ``individual acts of speaking are . . . merely fortuitous refractions and variations or plain and simple distortions of normatively identical forms; but precisely these acts of individual discourse explain the historical changeablility of linguistic forms, a changeability that in itself, from the standpoint of the language system, is irrational and senseless'' (p. 57). In more poetic terms, Voloshinov suggests that for individualistic subjectivism, ``language is an ever-flowing stream of speech acts in which nothing remains fixed and identical to itself'' while for abstract objectivism ``language is the stationary rainbow arched over that stream'' (p. 52). I would suggest that Voloshinov's descriptions of individualistic subjectivism and abstract objectivism match current expressivist and discourse community theories. However, Voloshinov proposes a third view, one that locates language in neither the creative process of the individual nor the readymade system of society. Arguing that linguistic systematization makes living languages dead, turning dynamic streams of polysemous language dispersed through time and space, across persons and social formations, into a static anonymous system, uttered by no one, no where, at no time, Voloshinov (1973, p. 83) concludes: . . . this system leads us away from the living dynamic reality of language and its social functions . . . Underlying the theory of abstract objectivism are presuppositions of a rationalistic and mechanistic world outlook. These presuppositions are least capable of furnishing the grounds for a proper understanding of history Ð and language, after all, is a purely historical phenomenon. (italics added for emphasis)

The critical move here is to reimagine language as concrete, dispersed streams of history, streams that are always simultaneously social and personal. In this view, language is neither inside nor outside, but between people (in the sense of flowing through and around them). Language is not driven by an abstract competence, but formed in a sociohistoric chain of situated utterances (oral or written). Language then does not exist as a system, a master plan, in any neoplatonic domain (whether of society, the brain, or the genes) to which we can retire for an explanation of what happens in the world; it exists only in the concrete, ever-evolving, dispersed world of happenings (which includes societies, brains, and genes). Voloshinov and Bakhtin clearly reverse Saussure's privileging of the system of language over the actuality of speech. As Bakhtin (1986, p. 71) argued, ``speech can exist in reality only in the form of concrete utterances of individual speaking people, speech subjects.'' However, they also reject the view that the actuality of speech is an asocial realm of individual creativity. For Bakhtin and Voloshinov (1973), language is always situated and social because Ð in production and understanding Ð it is dialogic along three planes: it uses and responds to past utterances, it is oriented to the immediate context of the situation, and it is

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addressed to future utterances and situations. Furthermore, they stress that discourse is never a neutral anonymous system of referential meaning; instead, it is infused with evaluative perspectives, affective colorations, and indexical traces of all kinds. From this perspective, a system is not the cooled, stabilized crust of individual creativity, but the stabilized effect of sociohistoric forces that tie together situated moments of activity.2 So, what does Bakhtin (1986) mean when he says that there are no voiceless words? I will look at this question in phases, attempting to bring out three key senses of voice: voice as associated with collective subjects of spheres of activity, voice as reenvoicing, and finally, voice as concrete utterance, a site where persons and social formations alike are produced. These three perspectives on voice are fused in practice, not in any sense mutually exclusive, but each has implications worth exploring separately. 3. Voices in society: linking discourse to collective subjects in activity Elbow (1999) and Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999) begin with the idea that everyday uses of voice in Western cultures are intrinsically tied to notions of the individual, whether to the expression of an individual's experience or to the political expression of an individual's views (having a say in decisions). What then should we make of a suggestion like Harris's (1997) that we might view voices as socially established and shared ways of speaking and writing? First, I would point out that we do have an everyday notion of collective voices. The notion of collective voice is expressed in common expressions, both directly (e.g., the voice of the people, of a generation, of reason) and indirectly (e.g., ``the people called for . . .'' or ``Science tells us . . .''). It is also realized quite literally in the prosodic and phonemic patterns that produce a recognizable voice, whether through formal instruction (received pronunciation in Britain) or through informal emulation (Valley girl speech). A notion of voice as social is also performed in practice when people speak as members of some group Ð projecting what they hope will be the recognizable voice of an ethnic or regional group, of a male or female, of a child or old person, of people who are well educated or not, of people who have some specialized knowledge (e.g., the voice of a doctor).

2 Sociohistoric theory attends to the macrosocial as well as the microsocial, but seeks to do so without relying on a structuralist invocation of macroactors, like culture and language, that slip outside of concrete history only to then govern it. Bakhtin talks about sociohistoric forces as centripetal (centralizing or unifying) and centrifugal (decentralizing or stratifying). It is important to recognize, however, that any act will simultaneously unify and stratify, depending in part on perspective. What might unify the discourse and social life of one group (a family, a discipline, an ethnic group) might simultaneously differentiate that group from others (the city the family lives in, other disciplines, a national identity).

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Voice in this sense is typified, the voice of a collective subject linked to the complex of identities, social relations, topics, and discursive forms that are associated with a sphere of activity, a domain of attention (like the body), or a durable social locale. A collective subject (Lektorsky, 1980) is not some type of social archetype impressed in the individual by the culture, but is the dynamic product of the typified relational identities built up through people's recurrent activity in a particular sphere of social life (e.g., the members of a family, certain typified ways of being parent, child, grandparent, cousin). A collective voice emerges as the discursive face of collective subjects in some sociocultural activity.3 At a number of points, Bakhtin (1981) produced lists of such collective subjects. For example, in talking about the stratification of language, he notes ``the language of the lawyer, the doctor, the businessman, the politician, the public education teacher . . ..'' (p. 289). At another point, Bakhtin suggests that ``certain kinds of internally persuasive discourse can be fundamentally and organically fused with the image of a speaking person: ethical (discourse fused with the image of, let us say, a preacher), philosophical (discourse fused with an image of a wise man), sociopolitical (discourse fused with an image of a Leader)'' (p. 347). A collective voice registers the social or institutional position from which a person speaks or writes, the content typically spoken/written about, relations with a typical range of addressees, the typical tone or key of the interaction, and so on. Because a collective voice is defined by multiple sociocultural dimensions, it is not limited to the literal sound of speech: It can carry over into written text. Because it is tied to the subject rather than a specific situated activity, it is related to but not reducible to genres. A voice in this sense may stretch across genres, genre systems (Bazerman, 1994), even national languages, both constituting and being constituted by them. It is also important to recognize that a single utterance, even a single word, may echo with multiple voices.4 In a poststructuralist analysis, Brodkey and Henry (1992, p. 147) defined voice as the relations between a discourse and its subject positions, as a notion that ``articulates the social identities of the discursive subjects it represents in relation to a discourse.'' Analyzing a full cycle of writing and response between an architecture student, his professor, and his teaching assistant, Brodkey and Henry identified six voices (the voices of architecture, the architect, the rhetoric of architecture, the architecture rhetor, the writing teacher, and the composition teacher). By tracing these voices (these linked shifts in discourse and discursive

3 Engestrom (1987) associates collective subjects with Leont'ev's (1981) activity theory, which describes concrete activity as a composite of three fused planes: socially and historically developed activity, individual goal-oriented action, and the situated, mediated conditions of operations. Engestrom associates each level of social activity with a particular kind of subject (action with individual subjects, operations with unconscious subjects, activity with collective subjects). 4 Extending Hanks' (2000) and Hengst and Miller's (1999) analyses of the interanimation of discourse genres, voices (as semiotic artifacts that emerge in discourse activity) themselves enter into dialogic relationships as they encounter and transform one another.

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identity), they attempted to portray how the student was positioning himself and being positioned as part of a process of disciplinary enculturation, of ways that the cycle of writing and response represented voice lessons that the student might conform to or challenge. Integrating Vygotskyan theories of development with Bakhtinian notions of dialogic utterances, genres, and voices, Wertsch (1990, p. 120) describes the centuries-long development of the voice of decontextualized rationality, a voice whose defining characteristic is that ``it represents objects and events (i.e., the referentially semantic content) in terms of formal, logical, and, if possible, quantifiable categories.'' He notes that this voice is realized in different languages, different genres, and quite varied settings. Perhaps serving as a kind of meta-voice of Cartesian rationalism that is now blended into many professional identities, this collective voice has been privileged in many educational, disciplinary, and governmental forums (see, for example, Gilligan's 1982 study of gendered patterns in ethical reasoning or Berkenkotter and Ravotas' 1997 analysis of the transformation of clinical talk into psychological case notes). It should be clear that romantic notions of voice as the expression of an autonomous individual are not the only notions of voice available to us, whether in everyday or specialized usage. Notions of collective or social voices also exist. Whether focusing on literal voice (the sound of speech) or discursive voice, these notions link discourse to typified social identities, relations, and activities found in particular social contexts. Voice in this sense becomes one way of signalling that language is profoundly and thoroughly indexical Ð always associated with persons who occupy some social± institutional positions and who engage in certain typical activities. However, the social dimensions of voice are not exhausted by considering this kind of typified voice.

4. Voices in the text: reenvoicing others' utterances As Wertsch (1991) notes, Bakhtinian theories raise the question of who is talking (or writing) in an utterance/text. Voice may be a way to explore the projection of figures in discourse as well as varied forms of intertextuality (ways utterances/texts are related to one another). Bakhtin (1981, 1984) and Voloshinov (1973) offer maps of who is talking that go beyond typical discussions of quotation and paraphrase to suggest a number of ways that others' voices may appear in a text. Consider the following passage from Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999, p. 62): In general, U.S. educators see instances of plagiarism as violations of honor and morals, and normally sympathetic teachers are often turned into angry and selfrighteous guardians of truth by them (Kolich, 1983). This view is predicated on cultural assumptions that many in the U.S. share: Texts are their authors'

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personal property, and helping oneself to a text without permission from the author amounts to stealing.

For a reader, it is important to recognize what Goffman (1981) called footings, the stances that a person takes up to her words. Goffman suggested that all utterances are set in particular participation frameworks (kinds of listeners and viewers) and production formats (relations of animation, authoring, and principalship). In the passage above, Ramanathan and Atkinson are often not acting as prinicipals, not, in other words, expressing their own beliefs and ideas. For example, at least in my reading, they do not hold the view that ``texts are their authors' personal property'' or that ``instances of plagiarism [are] violations of honor and morals.'' Of course, there are signals here that these words (or stances) are held by other prinicipals (mention of ``U.S. educators,'' ``sympathetic teachers,'' ``Kolich (1983),'' and ``this view''). However, neither of these sentences includes a textbook case of indirect or direct speech, and the citation to Kolich is ambiguous (pointing to a text that might present a paraphrase of this precise sentence, a large survey of U.S. educators' attitudes, or an apt illustration of a self-righteous angry teacher).5 Is it, in fact, clear from these sentences alone whether or not Ramanathan and Atkinson are endorsing these views of text? As an ESL teacher in universities, I often found my students' understanding of texts breaking down on just such questions. Contextualizing this passage through a wider reading of the article certainly could help clarify whether Ramanathan and Atkinson were endorsing this view of texts and teachers' responses to plagiarism; however, a Bakhtinian analysis would point to a number of dialogic resources within these sentences. For example, even without the charged term ``self-righteous,'' the phrase ``guardians of truth'' represents a kind of hidden polemic. To interpret this phrase requires not a dictionary, but an experienced history of texts, particularly of how ``truth'' and its ``guardians'' have been represented in certain academic and public texts, a history that helps identify the tone or key of this phrase as parodic in this case (where for some in other contexts or other times ``guardians of truth'' might be intoned reverentially or simply as a taken-for-granted fact).6 Consider the intertextual and indexical dimensions of another phrase in the above passage: ``This view is predicated on . . ..'' Intertextuality or dialogicality typically does

5 As Tannen (1989) documents, representation of others' speech, what she calls constructed dialogue, is remarkably complex and varied. In fact, it may even represent others' inner thoughts or unstated stances. For example, one morning when my wife and I were driving into school, a young man walked out into the street in front of us without looking. I slammed on the breaks, almost hitting him, and said, ``I'm invincible. I can't die.'' What I was doing was constructing a fragment of dialogue to represent what I took to be the unarticulated attitude of the young man. 6 In their book on Bakhtin, Morson and Emerson (1990, p. 133) suggest that ``the idea of `voice' is important because it immediately suggests `tone,' another key concept of Bakhtin's.'' For Bakhtin, they note, any act or utterance could be characterized by its tone Ð the ways it signals emotional, volitional, and evaluative stances, individuality, and the immediate context.

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not signify that a phrase is borrowed (reenvoiced) from a particular text, but that through experience with chains of utterances, we develop a feel for the text, a sense of who is likely to use such phrases in what kinds of contexts to create what type of communicative effects. This phrase (in content as well as form) does not sound like the talk of my children or the letters from my 94-year-old grandmother, like the conversational banter of the Letterman Show or the text of a typical newspaper article. It sounds like a formal academic utterance, one that I would associate more with the humanities or social sciences than math or physics. Of course, what I have done here is to locate the phrase and what it indexes in terms of my own communicative history. The extent to which that history is quasi-shared7 points to the importance of centripetal and centrifugal forces, to alignments of experience. In any case, projecting other people's words (or thoughts or unstated stances), drawing dialogically on previous utterances, and casting utterances in what Bakhtin and Voloshinov call their evaluative dimensions (agreement, disagreement, reverence, irony, volition, coercion, etc.), all are key discursive practices, reasons for suggesting that there are no voiceless words, no words that come from a dictionary.8 Porter (1986) notes that intertextuality involves both iterability (the repetition or repetition with variation of utterances) and presupposition (the ways an utterance takes other utterances for granted, the way it dialogically builds on, challenges, or plays off of such utterances). Repetition and presupposition both point to the way experience produces a sense of the expected (and the 7 I use ``quasi-shared'' here to call attention to the limits of ``shared experience.'' The quasishared nature of experience is most obvious when we recognize the differences in knowledge, perspective, and affect that people bring to some co-experienced event (e.g., a young child and an adult at a religious service, a white policeman and a black protester who ``shared'' the experience of a 1960s civil rights march in Alabama, a monolingual English speaker and a monolingual Chinese speaker co-experiencing a movie in Chinese with English subtitles). Quasi-shared experiences (especially recurrent ones) represent a potential resource for mutual understanding, but our particular ``takes'' on a situation or text can just as easily occasion miscommunication and conflict. 8 Of course, most of us have experienced what happens when someone does take words literally out of a dictionary. In many cases, the meaning as well as the tone of the utterance becomes muddy. However, these instances do not count as voiceless words, but as disjunctions of history. For example, a person producing such an utterance hears a history of use and tone in the words of the definition or translation (but perhaps feels a kind of blank silence, an emptiness, in the word itself) while the person receiving it hears a history of her experience of the word in varied contexts of use. What happens when people do take words from a dictionary is, thus, often an excellent example of how complexly voiced words and phrases are. Voloshinov (1973, p. 69) contrasts the signal and sign functions of language: Signals have a technical, mechanical, fixed meaning, pointing to some object or action whereas signs are living phenomena with multiple, dialogic, and dynamic senses. He notes that the signal function is always present to some degree in language, especially with the unfamiliar. He particularly notes how that function can be amplified by foreign language instruction, e.g., ``A word extracted from context, written down in an exercise book, and then memorized together with its Russian translation [Russian being the native language for Voloshinov] undergoes signalization.'' For this reason, he argues that foreign languages should be studied in a more communicative, contextualized fashion, with emphasis on situated utterances rather than abstract systems of language.

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unexpected). Fairclough (1995) discusses intertextuality and interdiscursivity (relations of discourse and genre more than specific text-to-text linkages) in terms of ways that they produce hybrid texts/utterances, but especially in terms of ways they constitute social identities, relations, and contexts. Looking at texts as reenvoicing, as intertextual and dialogic, does produce a quite different picture of discourse acquisition and use. For example, as part of a group of researchers studying early language acquisition through analysis of the crib monologues of one girl (Emily), Dore (1989) chose to go beyond the monologues (which other researchers were analyzing as Emily's own language play and as reflective of the internal teleology of language development). Comparing her conversations with her father at bedtime and the subsequent monologues Emily produced when alone, Dore found repetitions or close paraphrases of entire utterances as well as close relations, not only in topic, but in specific lexical and syntactic structures, generic organization (e.g., use of list structures), and prosody. For example, in one of Emily's crib narratives, she says: ``. . . on Saturday go Childworld . . . buy diapers for Emmy and diapers for the baby'' (italics in the original to indicate stress, p. 259). Dore notes that earlier that evening, Emily's father had repeated this plan three times, with slight variations, the final time saying: ``On Saturday . . . we're gonna go to Childworld and we're gonna buy diapers for Emily and diapers for Stephen and an intercom system . . .'' (p. 257). Dore argues that his analysis displays processes of reenvoicement in which Emily is partially reproducing and partially transforming her father's utterances (in prosody, lexicon, syntax, theme, and genre). He concludes that language acquisition involves ``not only the components of grammar (phonology, syntax, and semantics) but also the processes of genre (of thematic construction, of stylistic rendering, of discursive processes)'' (pp. 248 ±249). By extension, Dore's analysis suggests a fundamental reconceptualization of how people acquire languages (first, second, and beyond) at whatever age, a shift from understanding language as internal systems of syntax, lexis, and phonology with their own logics that are simply fed by external input to understanding language as intertextual and indexical, situated histories that are drawn on for current production and understanding (see also Becker, 1995; Tannen, 1989). Goffman (1981, p. 151) suggested that we need to consider the ways that, as we are socialized into speaking, we are also socialized into speaking for and as others, into envoicing and projecting diverse figures in our discourse. Using ``we'' or ``I'' or ``baby'' or a term of endearment or the child's name, and a lisping sort of baby talk, the parent makes it apparent that it is the child that is being talked for, not to. In addition, there are sure to be play Ð beings easy to hand Ð dolls, teddy bears, and now toy robots Ð and these the parent will speak for too. So even as the child learns to speak, it learns to speak for, learns to speak in the name of figures that will never be, or at least aren't yet, the self. George Herbert Mead notwithstanding, the child does not merely refer to itself through a

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name for itself that others had first chosen; it learns just as early to embed the statements and mannerisms of a zoo-full of beings in its own verbal behavior. . .9

In an analysis that took up Goffman's notions of footings (Hengst & Prior, 1998), we analyzed the figured voices in an 11-min and 30-s interaction (video- and audio-taped) of four family members engaged in three relatively foregrounded activities: a family chore of folding clothes, the disciplinary activity of recording the interaction for research, and a pretend game (called Cindy Magic by the participants). As Table 1 shows, we identified at least 20 of Goffman's zoo-full of beings who were spoken for, at least 20 voices in this sense. Table 1 also shows that some voices were animated by more than one participant. In fact, at several points, Anna was engaging in self dialogue, asking something in one voice and then answering in another. In this count, we were conservative, labelling robots, cheetahs, and especially self as single voices, whereas Goffman and our own analysis would suggest that the four selves at least (and probably the robots and cheetahs as well) were multiple, present in different footings with different voices over the course of this interaction. I should also note that the labelling of these voices went beyond the projected figures (who was speaking) to consider their embodied realization through variations in rate of speech, pitch, prosody, breathiness, as well as particular laughs, growls, yells, nonlinguistic vocalizations, and gestures. (In written text, visual±spatial and material cues as well as discursive ones can signal who is talking and in what capacity.) The obvious heterogeneity of voices in this interaction reflected the particularly marked lamination of the activities, especially the pretend game. Ochs, Gonzales, and Jacoby (1996) document a quite different example of people speaking for others in their analysis of a physics research team in which the scientists spoke in the first person for the physical ± theoretical objects they were studying. For example, one member of the team, pointing at a graph on a board, said, ``When I'm down, I'm in the domain state,'' where ``I'' referred to a diluted antiferromagnet (or perhaps more accurately to measurements of the atomic spins of those magnets) and ``the domain state'' was a theoretically defined space of partially ordered spins that was ``down'' in the lower area of a graph, representing certain combinations of lower temperatures and lower magnetic fields. These scientists' discursive practices may be less surprising when considered in relation to the voices in Table 1 that animate doors, shirts, locks, and so on. In my own research on writing in graduate programs (e.g., Prior, 1998), I have traced very specific intertextual relations. For example, consider the following

9

Cross-cultural research on child discourse acquisition has since made it clear that adult use of ``baby talk'' is a cultural practice, not a universal (Ochs, 1992), and obviously, many children in the world do not have dolls, teddy bears, and toy robots easy to hand. Nevertheless, such studies do find that children and adults reenvoice, speak for and as others (e.g., Hanks, 2000; Irvine, 1996; Schieffelin, 1990).

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Table 1 An inventory of voices in a family interaction (from Hengst & Prior, 1998) Anna (aged 4)

Nora (aged 8 1/2)

Paul (aged 40)

Julie (aged 40)

self Jane Cruella de Vil cheetahs robot door locks Mickey the Towel Aunt Cruella Magic student

self Mary Jane cheetah robot Mickey the Towel Julie the Shirt Nighty the Nightgown Greenie the Pants teacher

self Elizabeth Cruella de Vil cheetah robot door hunters

self

sentence from a graduate sociology student's draft of a conference paper (bold print added): The revised hypothesis is that change in any given life arena will have less adverse psychological and behavioral consequences if the adolescent has an ``arena of comfort'' in another domain, characterized by lack of change and satisfaction.

The sentence may seem unremarkable on its surface; however, the bold print actually marks the words that a professor (West) wrote in response to an earlier draft and that the student (Moira) then copied in on her revision. This kind of tacit co-composing of text was a marked feature of Moira's texts. For example, in responding to a single page of the 22-page fifth draft of Moira's conference paper, Professor West made 17 responses, all of which were direct textual revisions rather than questions or comments. In revising, Moira acted on all 17 of the responses, adding 105 of the 106 words West had written in, deleting all 83 words that had been crossed out, and making one rearrangement that was indicated. In discourse-based interviews about some of these changes, it also became clear that Moira often found the tone of West's revisions (especially the social identities that tone indexed) problematic even when she had come to find their content persuasive (for detailed accounts of this analysis, see Prior, 1998). These dialogic processes, by the way, extended from the conference papers to other related writing Moira was doing, including her written preliminary examination and the prospectus for her doctoral research, both of which West read as an examiner. In these texts, there was a very direct intermingling of voices. In another analysis (Prior, 1998), I examined the ways an NNES student (Mai) from Taiwan used source text to construct the background sections of her master's thesis in language education. Consider the following text (bold print added again): Advocates of a communicative competence approach make assumptions about language that have been largely ignored in traditional approaches to language assessment. Erickson (1981) argued that an appropriate model of language assessment assumes:

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1. Language is a symbolic, generative process that does not lend itself easily to formal assessment. 2. Language is synergistic, so that any measure of the part may not give a picture of the whole. 3. Language is a part of the total experiences of a child and is difficult to assess as an isolated part of development. 4. Both the quality and quantity of language use vary according to the setting, interactors, and topic. Language assessment should reflect the nature of the communication process and evaluate the major use of language Ð a verbal/social communicative interaction in a natural setting.

In this case, the bold print marks the only changes Mai made in taking text from a single source, which turned out not to be the book cited in the passage but another book. Interestingly, it also turned out (see Prior, 1998) that the book the student was copying from had actually incorporated large chunks of language from the original source (Erickson) in a very comparable fashion. These examples indicate the way that written texts may be quite literally multi-voiced, the product of heterogeneous processes in which multiple texts and authors come to intermingle in a single text, even when it appears to have a single author. Ivanic (1998) has also examined the varied ways students' texts display intertextual and interdiscursive relations. She analyzed the way students quoted from other texts, finding for example differences in their stances toward the quotes (e.g., as sources to agree with or disagree with) and in the extent to which the voices of the texts were infiltrating the surrounding discourse. She also examined unattributed quotations and patchwork use of source text, finding practices similar to those shown in Mai's text above. Finally, she used text-based interviews to explore the origins of specific wordings and phrasings. For example, asking one student (John) where an expression (``prone to opportune infections'') in one of his medical ethics papers on AIDS had come from, John replied: ``A medical textbook or a lecture. I wouldn't normally use words as `opportune infections''' (p. 200). Ivanic found that the student writers were able to articulate at least some of the origins not only for words and phrases, but for particular grammatical constructions (like, ``The fact is that . . .'') and for larger discourse types (certain styles of sentences, particular topical or organizational patterns). Ivanic concludes in part: . . . I have presented extracts of interviews with co-researchers which throw light on the actual intertextual origins of some portions or aspects of their writing. These were occasions when the writers have heard or read something specific, and from it acquired discursive resources which they have later deployed in their writing. Some of these original encounters were part of events within the course context, others were outside the course context. The examples show how writers

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pick up a word or two here, a syntactic structure there, an argumentation strategy or a structuring device elsewhere: the sources of the threads with which they weave their discourse are extremely heterogeneous. I suggest that there is a similarly rich history behind every piece of writing, if only every writer had the opportunity to reveal it. (p. 211)

Ivanic connected this discursive bricolage not simply with the construction of complex textures of language but with the production of complexly negotiated identities, with the micropolitics of social affiliation, disaffiliation, and temporizing. In a sophisticated exploration of relations between voices and subjectivities, Kamberelis and Scott (1992, p. 376) analyzed the complex origins of two elementary students' texts. One fourth-grade student, Lisa, wrote Living in the Black Life, which read in part: Its nice living in the black life. I haven't been harmed in Detroit. Back then black was treated bad and beaten and spat at . . .. We communicate with each other but it is a wonderful life that my life being black. And I don't hate for being black and other blacks shouldn't hate being black. They should be happy who they are. And no matter what whites do to blacks we are good people still. So love who you are don't hate yourself and thank God for making you a person.

Kamberelis and Scott found that, given the opportunity, Lisa could articulate many specific origins for her text: In relation to our Bakhtinian inspired typology of voice appropriation and transformation,10 Lisa appears to adopt the utterances of others in constructing the dual ideology of racial pride and self-love. She seems to assimilate them almost seamlessly into her own developing set of ideological stances. The people and groups whose utterances (and the ideologies embedded with them) Lisa adopts include Steve Winwood, Frank Capra, her family, her church, Jesse Jackson, and Professor L., a militant African ± American historian who spoke to her class. . . . for example, Lisa told members of a peer editing group that ``it's [the title] from a song I like called `Back in the High Life Again' [by Steve Winwood] that's about having a good life after some down times.'' Similarly, Lisa noted in an interview that ``I got the idea to say `it's a wonderful life' from a movie I saw at Christmas about a guy who wanted to kill his self 'cause his life was really a mess and how an angel told him he should like himself and go back and be with his family.'' (p. 377)

Kamberelis and Scott also quote Lisa's interviews in which she describes what Jesse Jackson said on TV, Professor L. said in class, and her mother and people in her church said regularly about the need for blacks to be proud even if they face hatred or mistreatment from whites. Kamberelis and Scott note: ``This message is re-envoiced in Living in the Black Life in a way that seems to preserve both the 10

Kamberelis and Scott (1992, p. 368) present a typology of ``voice appropriation, transformation, and resistance'' derived from Bakhtin's work and their own analysis that includes six categories: direct quotation, adoption, stylization, parody, hidden polemic, and idealization.

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urgency of the message and the ministerial cant in which it was originally delivered by Jackson and Professor L'' (p. 378). Bakhtin (1981, p. 293) suggests that ``all words have the `taste' of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour,'' that ``each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life.'' In this sense, we can see how intertextual relations are simultaneously indexical, as words and phrases come to carry the traces and echoes of their past contexts and probably the prospective buds of their future trajectories as well. In short, the issue of who is talking, as a question of intertextual ± indexical relations and as a question of the projection of figures spoken for, is critical to understanding discourse acquisition and use. Where traditional views of language represent it as a flat domain of words and rules (lexicon and syntax) and conventional sociolinguistic views have typically represented equally flat, if more complexly differentiated, domains of words, rules, notions, functions, and genres, attention to voices transforms such flat, depersonalized spaces into three-dimensional, peopled, and historied landscapes. 5. Voices in mind and society: utterance as a site of socialization and personalization I have pointed to ways that the notion of a typified voice links discourse to the collective subjects of particular spheres of activity as well as to ways that voice signifies reenvoicing and dialogically playing off of others' utterances. These senses of voice capture its social significations, but they could still be compatible with a notion of voice as a social code used in particular ways by individuals. In other words, they could still be compatible with that deep binary of the personal and the social that I began this article suggesting was inadequate. Bakhtin and Voloshinov can easily be misread as offering a view that matches Harris's (1997) account of external social voices that the individual must appropriate. After all, Bakhtin (1981, p. 293) does say things like: ``The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes `one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.''11 However, that quote continues: Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's

11 English translations of Bakhtin and Voloshinov's work made in the 1970s and 1980s display sexist language use, especially the misleading use of male pronouns as generic. I cannot attest to the language of the original Russian, but do want to highlight this problem as it appears five times in the two quotations here and twice in a quote from Voloshinov later in this section.

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contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. (pp. 293 ± 294)

This emphasis on particular people and on intentions, like Voloshinov's (1973) rejection of any view of language acquisition as a passing on of the family heirlooms, is critical to understanding the full import of a dialogic approach. The notion that all understanding involves active reception and evaluation applies also to all uptake of language in its acquisition. It follows then that whenever an individual produces an external utterance, it is personalized, not in the sense of coming from some transcendent self walled off from the world, but in the sense of bearing indexical traces of that person's sense-making in a specific, interested, historical trajectory through concrete social encounters. For Voloshinov and Bakhtin, the fundamental unit of communication, the utterance, is not only a site where the personal and the social meet, it is a site where the person and the society alike are produced. Utterance in Bakhtinian accounts has some very special, technical senses, which can cause readers confusion. Bakhtin (1986), for example, develops a set of contrasts between language (sentences) and speech (utterances, genres, voices), in which speech and utterance refer to the actual communicative activity of people at specific times and places while language and sentence refer to abstract objects that linguists construct for their analyses. Utterance (and speech) then may refer to what is written or spoken, to everything from a long book to an oral response cry. The utterance does not refer simply to a bounded productive act; it is not a thing passed from a speaker/writer to a listener/reader. The utterance is a process, a form of co-action or co-production, a circuit that is complete only when actively produced and actively received. It is fundamentally constituted through a chain of acts stretching from the past through the present and into the future. . . . any utterance, when it is studied in greater depth under the concrete conditions of speech communication, reveals to us many half-concealed or completely concealed words of others with varying degrees of foreignness . . . The utterance proves to be a very complex and multiplanar phenomenon if considered not in isolation and with respect to its author (speaker) only, but as a link in the chain of speech communication . . .. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 93)

When Voloshinov (1973) suggests that any word or sign is interindividual, shared territory, he is not referring to that ideal dyad, the speaker/writer and listener/ reader, but to all the people who have participated in the chain of communication. For this reason, when Bakhtin and Voloshinov talk about utterances being determined by the forms of social interaction they arise within, by the social relations of addresser and addressee, by the sphere of activity, they are not suggesting that there is on the one hand an utterance and on the other hand a context. They are suggesting that utterance and context are co-constitutive, aspects of a single evolving system. I believe the attempt to capture that dynamic holism explains why Voloshinov (1973, pp. 94± 95) repeatedly shifts to the image of utterances as parts of a stream Ð a more fluid, fuzzy, continuous image than

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that of a link in a chain: ``. . . the very verbal stream of utterances, which is what the reality of language actually amounts to, is a social stream. Each drop of that stream is social and the entire dynamics of its generation is social.'' Bakhtin (1986) defines speech genres as typified utterances that emerge within spheres of activity. (Here again, ``speech'' contrasts with ``language,'' signifying real communication, not orality.) Bakhtin emphasizes that people speak/write utterances not genres, that genres are not templates we instantiate, but dialogic relationships that emerge among situated utterances. In this view, national languages and the specialized discourses of professional and cultural activities truly exist only in the dispersed activity of communication distributed across time and space. Regularities of discourse at any level (that of a national language, the specialized discourse of a profession, a genre, or a voice) are not governed by a core system, a master program that people enact. Instead, regularities are emergent phenomena, forged in an intersection of material and sociohistoric forces that align and differentiate experience. An utterance then does not instantiate a language, culture, discipline, genre, or voice, but instead, in combination with other utterances and acts, it co-produces and co-constitutes such social objects. Utterance is a process where the person is socialized and the social is personalized. As emergent, dispersed pheonomena, regularities of discourse must be explained by forces that align people's experiences. These forces are not limited to the usual suspects of language centralization (e.g., standardization through schooling, dictionaries, government coercion, mass media). They also arise from the affordances embedded in the material world (e.g., gravity, climate, local ecosystems, our species' cycles of birth, maturation, and death) and in cultural artifacts (whether they are hammers or words, vertical lists or computers, family child-rearing practices or classroom pedagogy). They can arise from the long duree of history (wars, cycles of flooding, dominant technologies), from the horizontal spread of novel discourses through groups (as in the emergence ``from below'' of religious, cultural, and political movements), even from particular historical trajectories (e.g., a particular text, speech, film, event, the linked events of one person's life). A dialogic perspective is, thus, a radical departure from Saussure's (1959) sharp break between synchrony and diachrony. When there is no system that is outside of space and time, when there is nothing but concrete histories and their sedimented artifacts, then the high walls built between the personal/situated and the social/systemic fall and are converted into roads with heavy traffic. There is another potential source of confusion in understanding utterance (possibly also a distinction between Voloshinov's and Bakhtin's definitions of the term). For Voloshinov (1973, p. 96) at least, the utterance is not limited to external speech or text, but includes inner speech and text (with notions of inner utterance, inner genre): The process of speech, broadly understood as the process of inner and outer verbal life, goes on continuously. It knows neither beginning nor end. The

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outwardly actualized utterance is an island rising from the boundless sea of inner speech; the dimensions and forms of this island are determined by the particular situation of the utterance and its audience.

In this account, streams of utterances run through as well as around us; thought and language are brought together in an integrated account. Voloshinov clearly links these streams to the formation of the person: ``The process of a child's assimilation of his native language is the process of his gradual immersion into verbal communication. As that process of immersion proceeds, the child's consciousness is formed and filled with content'' (p. 81).11 Likewise, Leont'ev (1981, p. 57) argued that ``the process of internalization is not the transferal of an external activity to a preexisting, internal `plane of consciousness': it is the process in which this internal plane is formed.'' This work of producing consciousness is ongoing throughout the lifespan. Change is more dramatic in childhood, but can certainly be significant among adults (as personality changes related to sensory deprivation or immersion in ``cults'' suggest). Stability of consciousness and identity must be recognized as an achievement, and inner speech is certainly one of the key forces in that achievement. As a theory of personal development and social formation, a dialogic perspective encompasses two fundamentally linked processes, internalization and externalization. The underlying notion of internalization was articulated by Vygotsky (1978, pp. 56 ±57): ``. . . An operation that initially represents an external activity is reconstructed and begins to occur internally . . . every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological).''12 Wertsch (1991) emphasizes the contribution of Bakhtin's notion of hidden dialogue (dialogue with the second voice missing) to understanding internalized speech. Analyzing parent ± child interactions around a puzzle, he traced the shift from the parent's verbal and nonverbal scaffolding to the child's own self-regulation of the activity. Inner speech, like intertextuality, involves repetition and presupposition. In general, it does not involve full inner dialogue (e.g., a person mentally asking herself ``What does that piece look like?'' and then answering ``It looks like the bus''). Inner dialogue will typically appear as the answer that presupposes a question or even the shift to regulated attention without words (just looking at the pieces with a particular puzzle-making orientation). Wertsch argues that ``Bakhtin's account of dialogicality . . . suggests that what comes to be incorporated into, or presupposed by, an utterance are voices that were formerly represented explicitly in intermental functioning'' (p. 90). 12

Focusing on the domains of language and classification, Vygotsky generally presented internalization as a shift from external to internal; however, many (perhaps all) practices are never fully internalized but involve learning to act-with or co-participate in, a point that has recently been emphasized and has produced various terminological suggestions (see Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Prior, 1998; Wertsch, 1998).

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The notion of inner speech and hidden dialogicality, of inner speech as incorporating repetition and presupposition, could be used as a framework for analyzing think-aloud protocols, historically a key research tool in studies of writing processes. These notions then offer ways of rethinking what it means for writing to be understood and taught as a process. For example, in a seminar I taught in 1993, we all produced think-aloud protocols on a reading-to-write task (see Flower et al., 1990). Pulling three brief segments out of the 21-page transcript of my engagement with this 30-min task, I want to consider the voices that might be present. In the first segment below, I am reading aloud (all capitals) a paragraph on literacy from Hunter and Harmen and I begin questioning their definition by asking which texts one must be able to read, write, and understand to be literate. The stress I placed on the word ``whatever'' continued that line of doubt and the final comment shown, ``like physics,'' was said ironically, as an example of a kind of text that many highly educated people could not understand. . . . WITHIN THE GENERAL TERM LITERACY [clearing my throat], WE SUGGEST THE FOLLOWING DISTINCTIONS, ONE. CONVENTIONAL LITERACY, THE ABILITY TO READ, WRITE, AND COMPREHEND TEXTS, it's like what texts are you talking about? ON FAMILIAR SUBJECTS, AND TO UNDERSTAND WHATEVER SIGNS, LABELS, INSTRUCTION, like physics . . . TWO. FUNCTIONAL LITERACY . . .

After reading brief passages from five different texts, I reread the directions and began to ask how I was going to ``summarize and synthesize the ideas.'' In the next segment below, I am moving from a plan to look for themes to considering Hunter and Harmen's passage, labelling it for the first time as a ``traditional'' view and again questioning their lack of specification and contextualization for understanding signs. . . . I could summarize and synthesize the ideas presented in the quotations so I could be looking here for themes in terms of um, what literacy is and what- what themes are there here, drinking some coffee Ð hmm Ð what theme would I like to pull out? I mean conventional and functional literacy, Hunter and Harmen is just the Ð it's -hm, it's the least interesting, it's just the very traditional kind of discussion and and, I read it as being very empty, you know, UNDERSTAND// SIGNS, which signs? in which contexts? at what level of understanding?

After more thinking and reading, and jotting down a few brief notes, I began writing. Here is the transcript where I compose the second sentence. I begin writing (the italicized words), thinking, rereading what I had written (italic, all capital), and orally composing (quotes). . . . Traditional notions of literacy Ð whether conventional or functional Ð hm, I'm looking for a word here ``tend to'' ``ought to'' right, TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF LITERACY WHETHER CONVENTIONAL OR FUNCTIONAL um Ð aw, I had a word in my head, which I didn't say aloud, LITERACY IS A HIGHLY CONTESTED POLITICALLY CHARGED TERM. TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF LITERACY WHETHER CONVENTIONAL OR FUNCTIONAL Ð ``tend to be

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framed'' tend to be ``framed,'' ok, I'm writ- framed in terms of, TEND TO BE FRAMED OF IN TERMS OF skills and competence, often viewing Ð competence Ð as a Ð binary trait, ok, ``something you have or don't have,'' yeah, thinking about treating this as a draft, something you have or don't have, ok . . .

Traditional approaches to analyzing think-aloud protocols would categorize the recurrent processes (e.g., reading, rereading, writing, planning) in the transcript. However, from a dialogic perspective, I might instead look for signs of the internalized speech of others, whether as presuppositions or repetitions. For example, I am directly adopting (without quotation or citation) a categorical scheme (conventional vs. functional literacy) from Hunter and Harmen, a clear example of reenvoicing as repetition. In the second segment, I identify Hunter and Harmen's views as traditional, setting up a contrast between traditional and other (modern) views of literacy. In making this contrast, I am not echoing any particular text, but am acting in response to many texts I have encountered that tell a metanarrative of progress. In other words, this contrast and the organizational structuring it affords is another kind of repetition. When I question Hunter and Harmen in the first two segments, I am echoing a repeated experience Ð that incessant questioning of what, how, where, when, and why, that demand for precision and detail Ð that I have experienced in school and out, directed at others' texts and my own. The form of this practice is again intertextual repetition, reenvoicing with variation. However, it is also a presuppositional stance taken up in relation to texts: At no point in the transcript did I consider what stance I should take to these texts. (There are other stances, of course. I might have said the words aloud to savor their sounds and rhythms or have begun to memorize them in an attitude of awe.) Finally, there is my use of ``tend to.'' Here, I see hidden dialogicality (presupposition), my response to the repeated questioning Ð ``Always?'' Ð from teachers and readers that has crystallized into a metadiscursive, qualified stance to claims, typical of many academic texts. With this brief analysis, I mean to suggest some of the many ways that others' utterances are not only dialogically reenvoiced in a text, but are internalized, becoming central to modes of thought, to affective and evaluative stances, to the senses and practices of identity. Externalization, the other key process of Vygotskyan and activity theories, has often been ignored. Whereas internalization foregrounds the social production of the person, externalization foregrounds the production of the social, especially of the symbolic and material artifacts and practices that mediate human activity. Del Rio and Alvarez (1995, p. 220) emphasize the way that activity systems and complexes of semiotic-material mediators represent architectures for mind and agency and that changes in these architectures produce changes in human consciousness. Human sociocultural organization always facilitates a few common structures that will guarantee that there will be some kind of cultural construction of consciousness. These are socially and technically organized labor, language and

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other symbolic mediators for regulating behavior, and the cultural organization of social and instrumentally distributed activity.

Thus, internalization and externalization are not discrete processes, but are coconstitutive, in constant confluence. Externalization produces the external activity and artifacts that are internalized, and the process of internalization typically includes repeated externalizations, which Vygotsky (1987) stressed were also transformative. Externalization points to the personalization of the social. Bazerman (1988, 1999) has traced how biographical signatures (that is, traces of a particular person's interests, contexts, and practices) were embedded in scientific and technological genres and institutions. I have noted ways that the products and practices of Professor West's sociology research group bore her signature in this sense (Prior, 1998). Or you could think of any number of examples: Freudian psychoanalysis, the Nixon White House, Gates' Microsoft vs. Jobs' Apple Computer, the way one family member with a strong personality may dominate a family, even across generations. Recognizing that concrete social interactions, the basic ground within which utterances are formed, are where societies and people continuously co-produce one another also means recognizing that there can be no sharp binary between the social and the personal.

6. Some reflections on composition pedagogies and the voice question My central concern in this article so far has been theoretical, to explore ways that sociohistoric theories of voice point to an alternative conceptualization of discourse acquisition and use in relation to literate activity. However, the debate over voice has emerged under specific dialogic pressures, many of which clearly are driven by practical pedagogical issues. So, what difference does this theory of voice make? Does conceptualizing writing (literate activity) in terms of dialogic voices matter to the teaching of L2 writing? I want to conclude by discussing three contributions (presented in order of what I take to be their expanding implications) that this perspective might make to current thinking on writing pedagogy. First, these notions of voice suggest changes in the curriculum. Linking voices to typified subjects in spheres of activity suggests the need for greater attention within a social-discourse approach to questions of what kind of people use the discourse in what ways and addressing whom. For example, it should now be clear that the published texts in a discipline like sociology provide very uncertain models of what is expected from students (even at the doctoral level). Differences emerge from the intersections of social identities, social relations, and addressivity/audience. Sociology students are expected to write as certain kinds of socially recognizable students producing some school genre for certain professional readers in a class or program. Writing pedagogies could focus more concretely on the strategies suggested by such linkages of institutional position and audience to discursive identity (see Ivanic, 1998; Ivanic & Camps, this issue).

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Voice as reenvoicing points to the need for teaching much more sophisticated models than direct and indirect speech and for radically new ways of representing the use of sources and questions of plagiarism (see also Pennycook, 1996; Scollon, 1995). Minimally, the ubiquity of reenvoicing suggests a curriculum that highlights the resources that we use to project and perceive voices. Some of these resources are systematic, like the syntactic, lexical, pragmatic, prosodic, graphemic, and nonverbal resources for representing others' speech in English. Awareness of a fuller range of functions of, and resources for, reenvoicing could be promoted through writing instruction (see Ivanic & Camps, this issue; Scollon, Tsang, Li, Yung, & Jones, 1998). However, many of the resources are particular (intertextual ± indexical), like recognizing the way ``no x without representation'' or ``you look marvelous'' may echo particular persons and discourses, the way a particular lexical choice will sound like a fellow worker or a social stereotype, the way a certain textual format will evoke a certain text or genre. The value of having particular experiences, reading particular texts, seeing particular films, using certain machines, all suggest a syllabus that is less about abstract knowledge of notions, functions, and genres and more a syllabus of experience, of ways of being in the world. Second, this situated dialogic perspective argues that we must see pedagogy itself as situated practice, as utterances and acts within particular streams of social life. An abstract label for a pedagogy, process or communicative, expressive or social, offers very limited information. Crowley (1998), for example, notes the many ways that process approaches to teaching composition, which are often represented as a revolution that has overthrown current ±traditional rhetoric, have in fact continued to embody many of the central concerns and themes of current± traditional rhetoric (e.g., notions of original theses and topic sentences, continuing concerns with surface correctness, emphasis on certain organizational schemes). A wonderful demonstration of the disjunction of labels and practices can be seen by examining detailed accounts of two different classrooms that claim to follow Donald Graves' process approach to teaching writing. Atwell (1987) describes a class where students choose what to write and control their own processes (including when, even if, to finish their texts). Atwell never reads or writes on her students' drafts, limiting in-progress response (up to the final phase of editing) to conversation about the text. A close reading makes it clear Atwell does orchestrate classroom activity and takes a lead role in establishing goals for grading. She also ``nudges'' students daily through a mix of model texts, heuristics, mini-lectures, public accountabilities, and varied types of conferencing. Michael (1987) and Ulichny and Watson-Gegeo (1989) describe another middle grade class that applies Graves' approach, but displays radically different pedagogical practices. Mrs. Jones, the teacher, makes common assignments, demands specific revisions from students in conferences and through written comments on drafts, and micromanages the students' processes. Whereas Atwell's class produces a great variety of texts according to individual schedules (with nudges from Atwell to stay productive), Mrs. Jones' class produces cookie-

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cutter texts written to the teacher's template and according to the teacher's schedule. Considering these kinds of radical difference in ways that abstract pedagogical labels and principles are realized in practice, a dialogic approach suggests less debate on such labels and principles and more attention to the specific practices of pedagogies-in-use. I suspect that situated examination of pedagogies would reveal unexpected common ground and unexpected differences both within and across the approaches represented as expressive and social in the voice debates. Third, central to sociocultural approaches is the notion that the social production of the person (learning/development) is a continuous process, what Lave and Wenger (1991) call situated learning, a form of co-participation in cultural practices that occurs in all arenas of life. From this perspective, it is critical to understand expressivist pedagogies as cultural operations, even for people within the culture, as part of a paradoxical ethnopedagogy that says feel free to explore and express but in the end often judges products against some very specific cultural standards (e.g., Inghilleri, 1989). Kamberelis and Scott (1992, p. 366) argue that typical accounts of expressive voice have served ``the double and paradoxical surveillance function of honoring (read: demanding) individual creativity and guarding against plagiarism,'' noting that ``ironically, these theoretical accounts that purport to celebrate `individuality' do so as a form of control.'' One way of understanding expressivist pedagogy is as a proleptic invitation, a call to form a subjectivity that organizes rather disparate practices of intertextual and interdiscursive bricolage under the label of original authorship and under an ideology invested in denying that this label is a label, in treating it as a fact. On the other hand, this perspective also problematizes the question that Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999, p. 56) ask, ``How realistic is it to regularly expect or demand of our NNS students that they basically become someone else?'' As uncomfortable as the recognition may be, a dialogic theory insists that all activity involves becoming, whether it means becoming someone else or stabilizing who we have become through earlier experience, whether it means changing social practices and institutions or (re)producing them. In this view, teaching and learning language can never be simply about transferring or acquiring skills, codes, and rules. All activity, including the teaching and learning of literate practices, involves political, social, and ethical responsibilities for (re)making ourselves and our worlds that we cannot elide, that we should be aware of and decide how to address. Finally, from this perspective, there is one deep flaw in the notion of voice, the way it continues to privilege language at the expense of the full semiotic toolkit (e.g., see Kress, 1997; Wertsch, 1998; Witte, 1992). However, for nonverbal, visual, and material signs, there is not a term that so clearly connects the person to the semiotic means. If currently dominant Western notions of the self are uncomfortably ethnocentric, the notion of an individual person certainly appears to be a norm of human existence. Is there a culture where people do not have names, where each person is indistinguishable from and interchangeable with any other? Diverse ideologies and practices produce diverse forms of life and diverse

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possibilities for identity, but the bare fact of individual identity is not owned by any specific culture. A dialogic, sociohistoric notion of ``voice'' may not be perfect, but it does offer resources for getting beyond the binary of the personal and the social, for taking a complex view of agency as distributed across persons, practices, artifacts, and cultural activity systems. It is also a perspective with significant pedagogical implications. From a dialogic perspective, communicative competence in general, and learning to write in the genres of some language in particular, are not questions of an individual acquiring words and rules (whether syntactic or generic) to govern performance. Instead, both are fundamentally sociohistoric processes. Learning to write, to engage in meaningful and recognizable forms of literate activity, involves living through concrete histories of reading, writing, talking about and using texts in the heterogeneous domains of a social practice (e.g., in class and out, in talk and text, in formal and informal settings), and then drawing on and transforming those histories to act with others in the present and project some desired future. It is this complex task that we must understand with our theories, investigate in our research, and address through our teaching.

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