Abstract:
The present study explored the intensity level of authorial voice in relation to the quality of argumentative writing. 42 undergraduate learners of English as a foreign language (36 girls and 6 boys) spent 45 minutes to individually complete in-class position-taking writing tasks for three weeks. Their overall academic writing quality scores assigned based on portfolio assessment were studied in relation to their voice expression quantified using a voice intensity rating scale (VIRS). Findings indicated that, among the components of authorial voice, only “assertiveness” showed a positive moderate relationship with academic writing quality (r=0.45, p≤ 0.05). In the follow-up qualitative analyses of voice-expression strategies, interviews with participants whose voice intensity had been rated either as the strongest or as the weakest showed nine strategies for voice expression. At the sentence-level, high-voice participants most frequently used intensifiers to express assertiveness, while low-voice writers tried to use other lexico-grammatical tools. At the text-level, both high-voice and low-voice participants were concerned about the effect of the topic on their voice expression. The findings imply that undergraduate English as a foreign language writers do try to express voice and that the required strategies can be one of the targets of EFL writing research and instruction.
Machine summary:
"Using this instrument, they classified elements of voice into two levels and four scales: a) Sentence level Scales including Assertiveness (established through linguistic devices such as hedges and intensifiers) and Self- Identification (established through the use of first-person pronouns and using active structures) and b) Paragraph level Scales including Reiteration of Central Point ( how often and how explicitly the main argument is rearticulated) and Authorial Presence and Autonomy of Thought (overall presence of the author’s voice) Inspired by the work on voice reviewed here, our study addressed the following two research questions in relation to undergraduate argumentative academic writing in English as a foreign language: (Argumentative texts were used because of their high frequency and significance in university writing practices).
Even though we could use the English part of the university matriculation exam that they took, administer a version of Test of Written English, or use ESL Composition Profile (Jacobs, Zinkgraf, Wormuth, Hartfiel, & Hughey, 1981), we preferred to wait until week 16 at the end of the term and to obtain each learner’s overall writing quality score which was assigned based on portfolio assessment.
In other words, component-specific results and the overall results summarized in Table 2 below showed some positive relationships between voice intensity of the texts written by undergraduate EFL writers and the quality-based EFL writing achievement scores that they gained at the end of the term."