2018 Annual Conference of China English Language Education Association (CELEA2018)

182 / 2018-06-29 23:26:32

Applying Dialogic Pedagogy to the Construction of Chinese MA Students’ Authorial Voice in English Academic Writing

voice construction; dialogic pedagogy; Chinese MA students; English academic writing

Plenary track > 中国特色英语教学研究

While previous studies of voice that informs L2 academic writing have provided considerable insights into its conventional features and functions, classroom practice and research have not kept pace with these developments. Drawn from the social perspective and dialogic nature of voice, this study reports a classroom experiment of applying dialogic pedagogy to the construction of Chinese MA students’ authorial voice in English academic writing. Based on Canagarajah’s heuristic model for voice analysis, specific research focus is put on how the application of dialogic pedagogy enhances students’ open-mindedness, academic authorship and self-making. The participants in the study were 27 first-year Chinese MA students of different disciplinary backgrounds who took a one-year dialogic pedagogy-based English academic writing course. Their texts of multiple academic writing tasks were collected as small corpus for quantitative data analysis of their discursive voice features. Six students among them were chosen representatively for interviews to explore qualitatively their voice construction processes. Participant classroom observations were also conducted for further triangulation. The findings of the study indicate that dialogic pedagogy can not only provide students’ with pedagogical affordances but also facilitate them to negotiate their identities, roles, subjectivity, and awareness as academic writers in recursive and progressive patterns.