Revoicing across Learning Spaces
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REVOICING ACROSS LEARNING SPACES
INTRODUCTION
In the context of a considerable amount of language research applying Bakhtinian ideas about voice and dialogue, I shall focus here on studies that look specifically at revoicing, sometimes referred to as discourse representation or ventriloquation. Our language, as Bakhtin puts it, is full of other people’s voices (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984). We quote other people as authorities or call into question what they have said, fill our anecdotes and stories with recreated dialogue (Tannen, 1989), and reproduce the voices of teachers, friends, newspapers and politicians. Voices may be framed grammatically or prosodically as reported speech, or signalled as ‘imported’ in a range of other more subtle ways, or they may appear to merge with the speaker’s own voice (Bakhtin 1984, 1986), traceable only through a knowledge of the speaker’s previous language experience. In addition to reporting and reconfiguring actual utterances, or features of specific voices, we may also take on and reproduce the voice of a genre or discourse, for example the genre of online chat, or the discourse of advertising, or imitate the voice of a particular social group, for instance by putting on a different accent. While the language of people of all ages is filled with the features of other voices, which may or may not be identifiable, the ways in which students take on, reproduce and represent the voices of significant people, texts and genres in their lives are particularly interesting because of the implications of this revoicing for learning and meaning-making. Researchers have examined what the multi-voiced nature of children and young people’s language can reveal about how they draw on, are positioned by and interrogate the resources of their cultural worlds, and language educationalists have begun to look at how insights about revoicing can inform and drive pedagogy. T H E O R E T I C A L F O U N D AT I O N S
In this section I briefly introduce how ‘voice’ is linked to ‘genre’ and ‘social language’ in Bakhtin’s work, and note some ways in which the notion of revoicing has been used by psychologists and linguists. I then go on, in the subsequent section, to discuss how these ideas have been applied in educational research on language and learning. M. Martin-Jones, A. M. de Mejia and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Discourse and Education, 81–92. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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J A N E T M AY B I N
Bakhtin (1981, 1986) argues that we cannot communicate other than through speech genres, i.e. the patterns of language form and use, content themes and evaluative perspectives that emerge in a specific sphere of human activity. Children learn these genres at the same time as they learn language itself. They also learn how different ways of using language (e.g. accent, grammar and style) are associated with what Bakhtin calls the ‘social languages’ of different social classes, ethnic groups, age groups, generations and so on. When speakers or w
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