9-23-09-Voice

I found one of Atkinson’s (2001) question interesting because he showed how trying to teach individual voice, whatever its definition is, can disadvantage non-native English speaking or non-mainstream students: “Is voice really being taught in the L1-oriented composition classroom?” (p. 111)

Some students, I believe many of the mainstream students, are raised in households where individual voices are encouraged and children are naturally exposed to parents’ ways of communicating with others in various literacy practices. This early socialization can give them a headstart, compared to those who “suffered harsh educational consequences” (p.111) due to the lack of extensive exposure to “prior socialization” (p. 111).

Some children from relatively higher socio-economic background can access a lot of literate sources from birth. Their parents might use writing to express themselves for their jobs or at home regularly. Other children might not have any parents who read bedtime stories to them, or their parents might never read or write since they graduated from high school. These two groups of students obviously start on a different footing when they enter education system.

In this sense, literacy and socio-economic power is so intertwined that we cannot actually separate them. Mainstream American students, although not all, need to learn the things that they already learned at home. And the things that they already learned from home is not simply language, but a complex bundle of social and cultural assumptions and values, which minority or international students have no access to. If we cannot detach individual voice from the rest of the social-cultural sets of values, how we can teach it to students, even to L2 students? Or if ever possible to do so, how can teachers teach that in just a few semesters when mainstream students learn that for their entire lives?