In Press: Linguistics and Education
ABSTRACT
We investigate the practices by which bilingual university students in Hong Kong appropriate texts in producing utterances, particularly written texts. Following Wertsch and his colleagues we ask:
What can these processes tell us about what they now can do with discourse representation and
what do we need to teach them?
This research shows that our students’ writing displays considerable intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Responses to this writing in tutorial sessions indicate that they are skilled at orchestrating the multiple voices within their own discourses. The commonly stated concern that our students do not know how to do quotation and citation correctly is somewhat misplaced and researchers need to move the focus away from the mechanisms of citation and attribution to the social practices of textual appropriation.
A common problem in both writing and reading is coming to an understanding of how multiple voices may be represented within a single text. On a somewhat superficial pedagogical level this is often stated as simply a question of teaching students how to do accurate quotations and citations. Recently the ideological underpinnings of this pedagogical simplification have started to become clearer (Scollon, 1994, 1995; Pennycook 1996). As researchers are now arguing that all texts, whether spoken or written, are fundamentally dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986, 1990, 1993), the question of quotation and citation may be rephrased more productively as a question of how writers and readers are positioned as social subjects through what Fairclough calls discourse representation (1992, 1995).
In this reconceptualization of the issue, key concepts are voice, appropriation, and discourse representation. Following on Bakhtin’s original formulation[2] it is becoming clear that all texts are dialogic (polyvocal or intertextual) in two senses: On the one hand all texts answer or respond to previously uttered texts while anticipating responses, and on the other hand all texts are crafted out of borrowed language and thus in being uttered reflect both the utterer’s voice and the voices of those from whom s/he has borrowed the text. That is to say, all texts are uttered in multiple voices in response to multiple voices and in anticipation of polyvocal responses.
A number of researchers in education have recently taken up this perspective, showing how, in reading (see for example Hartman, 1992), a reader constructs meaning by generating ‘intertextual links among textual resources to fit a particular context, borrowing, adapting, appropriating and transforming texts in her mind’ (Hartman, 1992, p. 298), and in writing (see for example Ivanic, 1992) how writers draw from different intertextual sources to construct authorial identities. Still others have attempted to discover intertextual links between reading and writing and reading and speaking, examining the relationship between the texts students read and the ones they write in particular social contexts or the ways they engage with other learners with these texts (Short, 1992). Bloom (1993), in a study which seeks to trace the intertextual connections between reading and writing, takes a materialist view of intertextuality, seeing it as ‘social action’ through which people ‘construct intertextual relationships by the ways they act and react to each other’ (p. 311).
This focus on utterance as a kind of action is, it seems to us, essential if we are to understand the connections between texts, the choruses of voices they contain, and the various social practices that result from their use. A similar emphasis on what is being done (as opposed to what is simply being said) can be seen in Wertsch’s (1991, 1994, 1995) notion of communication as mediated action through which individuals appropriate and adapt various social voices to the demands of unique utterances. In this conceptualization which owes much to the thinking of Vygotsky (1978), the crucial question is not so much what the structure of a text is as what the utterer is doing in producing a text. That is: how has the person[3] uttering the text borrowed from other voices to accomplish this action? Since each voice drawn upon has embedded in it certain sets of social relationships and practices, this perspective allows us to focus on the relationship between individual utterances and the cultural, historical, and institutional settings in which they occur, a relationship which, according to Wertsch, is marked by an ‘inherent tension between a cultural tool and its unique, contextualized usage’ (1995, p. 140).
In a series of studies Wertsch and his colleagues (Tulviste & Wertsch, 1994; Penuel & Wertsch, in press; Wertsch & Rozin, in press) studied the appropriation of texts of historical discourses into several narrative tasks. They found that their subjects relied heavily on existing historical and cultural discourses in constructing their own narratives of significant world events. In post-Soviet Russia, subjects appropriated the voices of official Soviet history, even when constructing oppositional narratives. American students appropriated from the American historical discourses of civil liberties and individual freedoms which are naturalized as official discourses by American educational practice in constructing narratives about individual choice in the contemporary world. What was significant about these findings was that voice appropriation was rarely a matter of straightforward citation of ‘other peoples’ ideas’, but rather a complex set of linguistic strategies through which voices were not just appropriated, but also adapted and contested as writers negotiated the tension between mediational means and their unique use.
This broader perspective on voice appropriation does not deny the importance of equipping students with the tools to follow conventional rules of citation demanded in academic and institutional discourse. Rather, our hope is to provide teachers and learners with an alternative way to view citation, seeing it as part of the larger, more fundamental issues of polyvocality and discourse representation.
WHOSE VOICE IS THIS?
This analytical framework orients toward a new set of questions. In the earlier pedagogical framework the questions were: ‘What is the correct way to cite the language of someone other than the author within the author’s text?’ and ‘How can we teach students to do such citations accurately?’ Our research is directed toward a different set of questions which can be phrased somewhat simplistically as:
Whose voice is this? That is, what is the texture of polyvocality in this utterance?
Where did this voice come from? That is, what is the historical, cultural, social source and what social practices are embedded in the use of this voice?
How is this voice represented? That is, what linguistic (or other) means are used to indicate voicing and appropriation?
Before going further, however, it becomes necessary to define what we mean by ‘voices’ and to clarify what counts as a ‘voice’, and what does not. Kamberelis and Scott (1992) point out that there are at least four contemporary uses of the term: Cartesian voice, or the personal voice of the individual writer behind the text; rhetorical voice, seen as a unique style resulting from intentional rhetorical activity; creative voice, or that singularity of utterance which is sought by writers as an emblem of both individuality and artistic achievement; and verbal-ideological voice, voice in the Bakhtinian sense, ‘a packet of discourse replete with an ideology’ (Kamberelis & Scott, p. 368). More traditional pedagogical practice usually approaches voice through one of a mixture of the first three perspectives, seeing it as an object owned by the writer, emanating from his or her individual consciousness, marked by a certain degree of uniqueness (or ‘creativity’, as writing teachers are fond of calling it), and protected (by both law and classroom practice) from being ‘inappropriately’ claimed as belonging to another.
The context of a broader conceptualization of the problem of voi ce appropriation in student writing, however, demands that we adopt the wider, Bahktinian notion of ‘voice’, which questions the existence of either a unitary author or a unitary text and focuses on those parts of other people’s language that people borrow and transform to make their own utterances. Such appropriation may involve utterances taken verbatim (either cited or uncited) from other sources, may involve borrowing features of other people’s language like style, register, genre, or may involve taking up wider systems of meaning corresponding to Foucault’s (1976) ‘orders of discourse’, or what Gee (1996) calls ‘Discourses’ with a capital D. Bahktin’s approach allows us to understand (and hear) voices in two senses: in the macro sense as echoes of larger constructs of power/knowledge and social practice, and in the more conventional sense of particular voices from particular texts recognizable by such features as the words and phrases they use and how these are textualized. Fairclough (1992) distinguishes between these two levels of intertextuality by calling the appropriation of other’s actual words manifest intertextualtiy and the appropriation of broader aspects of other’s discourse in the form of styles, genres and ideological positioning constitutive intertextuality, or interdiscursivity.
THREE WRITING TASKS
Our concern in this paper is with how students in Hong Kong appropriate the voices of others and represent them in their own discourse when doing classroom writing tasks relating to the transition of sovereignty from the British to the Chinese government. This study is part of a larger project covering a period of two years encompassing pre-transition and post-transition data sets as well as studies carried out during the crucial two months of the summer of 1997 to map the relationship between public discourse about the transition and both the academic and non-academic discourse of university students. Our first step in this project, reported here, was to establish to what extent intertextuality and interdiscursivity could be observed in the academic writing of our students and what features in their texts were used to signal it. Our interest is not so much to find out what the students think about the transition as how they mobilize the multitude of voices made available to them in the social world to fulfill what they perceive to be the demands of particular academic writing tasks.
Modeling our study on those of Wertsch and his colleagues we are asking the following key questions:
What can these processes tell us about what they now can do with discourse representation and
what do we need to teach them?
For this analysis we gave three tasks to second year students in a course in English for Professional Communication at City University of Hong Kong. Fifty-nine of the sixty students were Hong Kong Chinese, and all of them were between 19 and 23 years of age. They had studied English as a second language for at least eight years, and many of them had received English medium secondary education. The course in which they were enrolled is designed to train them for careers in professional communication such as journalism, public relations and advertising. On the first day of a compulsory course in ‘Intercultural Communication’, these sixty students were asked to write three short letters as described below:
You are a Hong Kong Chinese of your parent’s generation. A friend who has immigrated to Vancouver has written you a letter asking you if you plan to immigrate to Canada as well. You answer that you do not plan to do so because you believe that Hong Kong has a strong future of which you want to be part.
You are a Hong Kong Chinese of your parent’s generation. A friend who has immigrated to Vancouver has written you a letter asking you if you plan to immigrate to Canada as well. You answer that you very much hope to do so because you believe that Hong Kong has a questionable future and you are afraid of those future developments.
You are yourself and writing a letter to a friend who has immigrated to Vancouver. Write a short letter which first gives your opinion about the future prospects for Hong Kong and which then gives your reasons for your opinion.
The assignment was given at the beginning of the class without a great deal of elaboration. Students were told how long they would have to do the tasks, fifteen minutes each task, and that their products would be collected for a later classroom activity but not to be used as part of their formal assessment in the module.
After receiving the students’ letters, we analyzed them to see to what extent multiple voices could be identified, from what sources those voices were appropriated, and what means were used for that discourse representation. That analysis was returned along with the original responses to the students in tutorial sessions in which they themselves were asked to identify the various voices speaking in the texts and how these voices are represented. Our report here is a synthesis of our original analysis and the responses of the students to the original tasks and to our analysis.
Voices
In the student responses to these tasks, the main voice one hears is the voice of the author of the letter. This should be made clearer, however. By ‘author’ we mean the fictionalized author (Chatman, 1978), not the actual writer of the letter. That is to say, as the following example taken from a response to the first task shows, the student has fictionalized the voice of a person of her/his parent's generation writing to a friend in Vancouver as the task requested. The tone is chatty and friendly and marked as the author's own voice by such linguistic means as the use of the first person and second person pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’. The writer also uses the vocative ‘Hey guy’ and explicit voice marker ‘in my opinion.’
While this opening segment of the letter sets the utterance as being in the author’s own voice in direct address from the writer to the reader, it is also dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986, 1990, 1993) in that it is clearly set as a response to the author’s friend’s letter. S/he uses phrases such as ‘receive your letter’, ‘according to your letter’, ‘you love it very much’, ‘right’. This single-author utterance embeds a dialogue. For example a dialogue segment such as
I'm concerned about your future in Hong Kong.
There's no need to be concerned, I suppose it will be a bright one.
is embedded in the utterance segment
you've concerned about my future in Hong Kong, however, in my opinion, I suppose it will be a bright one.
Thus even at this very basic level, these student writing tasks can be seen to be dialogic or polyvocal,
containing these two primary voices: a fictionalized writer responding to a fictionalized reader. How students conceptualize these two voices will help determine the strategies they use in appropriating and adapting other voices.
Within these two primary voices, a multitude of other voices can be heard. If we look at the full response below we can see that there are at least two other voices present.
Hey guy! It’s nice to receive your letter as you seldom writes!
Ha, Ha!
How’s your life in Vancouver? According to your letter, I guess you love it very much, right? I feel so warm and appreciate much that you’ve concerned about my future in Hong Kong, however, in my opinion, I suppose it will be a bright one.
Hong Kong people have been characterised as hardworking, smart and helpful group and it is such properties which make Hong Kong to be such a successful city. I don’t think that these properties will disappear just because we have a new government/ruler. Moreover, I’m sure that the Chinese Government will not want to cease the prosperity of Hong Kong as Hong Kong means “a goose which lays gold eggs to her”!
So, please don’t worry about my future here as it will be great & much more brighter than before.
Wish you a terrific life in Vancouver &...write me soon.
In the third paragraph is the phrase ‘Hong Kong people have been characterised as’ which clearly indicates that what follows, the characterization of Hong Kong people, is not in the author's voice but in a more general, anonymous, public voice. That is, the voice which says that Hong Kong people are ‘hardworking’, ‘smart’, and ‘helpful’ is a third voice which the author is representing in the text through this phrase ‘have been characterised’. It is unclear whether the following phrase ‘and it is such properties’ is to be taken as the author's voice or the voice of the anonymous characterizer of Hong Kong people. The author might have written: ‘and I think it is such properties’ or s/he might have written ‘and they are also characterised as’. Thus this phrase because of its ambiguity is shared to that extent in both voices. That is, it is polyvocal as being both the voice of the author and the voice of the anonymous characterizer of Hong Kong people. What is clear is that the author then distinctly marks the return of his/her own unambiguous voice with ‘I don’t think’. Such ambiguity is, in fact, common in all discourse and represents a strategy through which the author positions the fictionalized writer in relation to other voices s/he has appropriated.
Another moment of interesting polyvocality is in the phrase ‘a goose which lays gold eggs to her’. Here the author clearly marks off this fourth voice by using scare quotes. This is the voice of tradition speaking through a proverbial phrase, 'the goose that lays golden eggs'. Actually in this utterance we see at least two, perhaps three, voices speaking. There is the voice of tradition on the one hand which the author has marked, but there is also the author's--or, in fact, we should probably say the writer's--voice in the phrasing being couched in awkward English. While the formulaic proverbial statement can be stated in various ways--'which' rather than 'that', for example, such proverbial statements cannot be stated in such a widely divergent manner as 'lays gold eggs to her'. This is the voice of the English student with less than perfect command of English. Whether we are to understand this voice as the student doing the exercise or the voice of the fictionalized author is a point to which we will return later. In any event, it is a voice which is not the voice of tradition and thus this portion of the utterance is also polyvocalic.
Without wanting to stretch a point, this phrase, as well as the ‘characterisation’ of Hong Kong people as ‘hardworking, smart and helpful’ also embeds a general voice of public discourse used in speaking about the future of Hong Kong. The proverbial phrase, ‘the goose which lays the golden eggs’ is very commonly used in newspapers and television discussions of the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, and explicit characterizations of Hong Kong people such as those above are common features of current political and commercial discourse. (A recent television advertisement for Hong Kong Bank, for example, presents viewers with an almost identical characterization to justify optimism about Hong Kong’s future.)
Along with ‘prosperity’, ‘confidence’, ‘rule of law’ and a variety of other terms, these phrases form a public discourse of what Flowerdew (1997, in press) calls ‘colonial withdrawal’.
The extent to which students draw upon this discourse, and the social and political ramifications of such appropriation, is, however, not our immediate concern. Rather, we are interested in what discursive means students use to combine these and other social voices and how they signal instances of voice appropriation in their writing.
Given that all texts are intertextual and that they contain a variety of voices which link up to other voices outside of themselves, it remains to ask how these multiple, conflicting, contesting and polyphonic voices are actually represented linguistically, and how do we know?
Studies of quotation and citation have focused primarily on coming to understand the linguistic means and the semantic functions accomplished by embedding one stretch of text within another. Notable among such studies for our purposes are Halliday (1985), Caldas-Coulthard (1993), and Fairclough (1992, 1995). Halliday's concern is primarily with projection which is the process by which a clause represents other language rather than experience. If one writes, He said, 'That's ridiculous' the text within quotation marks is set off from the reporting clause ‘He said’ as belonging to two different classes of utterance. The reporting clause is what is being said in this utterance, the reported clause is being projected as being uttered text, not as utterance in itself. Caldas-Coulthard's (1993) concern is with social practices by which participants in discursive events are positioned. She prefers to use the term 'speech representation', especially since her main interest is in journalistic narratives in which women are positioned as holding less significant social statuses than men through being represented discursively as having lesser voice.
Kamberelis and Scott (1992), in their attempt to elucidate principles of critical language awareness in literacy classes for children, provide a typology of discourse representation incorporating ‘appropriation, transformation and resistance’ which includes such practices as ‘direct quotation’, ‘adoption’ (when a writer’s voice completely merges with another’s), stylization (in which the writer ‘tries on’ the discourse or style of another while still retaining some degree of objectivity towards it), parody, hidden polemic and idealization. These categories, while providing useful insights, in our view more accurately represent what might be called ‘stances’ that writers take up towards the voices they appropriate, operating on a level rather far from the text. In order to discover how writers represent these voices linguistically requires a set of text-based categories.
We prefer Fairclough's (1992) formulation of ‘discourse representation’ because of the perspective he takes, looking at how the polyvocality of utterance is accomplished in discursive acts. His concern, like ours, is with linking the concrete features in texts with various kinds of discursive practices and locating the means by which discursive participants are positioned in relationship to historical, cultural and social practices.
Fairclough identifies two broad classes of discourse representation: cases in which the boundary between voices is marked and cases in which the boundary is not marked. Within those two classes he then further identifies a number of means by which this representation takes place.
He said that it was ridiculous.
Negation similarly presupposes polyvocality as in
Naturally, in spoken discourse paralinguistic cues such as contrastive stress, intonation, or even non-verbal cues such as raised eyebrows may perform the marking of irony. Fairclough does not explicitly take up the question of paralinguistic cues and non-verbal contextualization (Gumperz, 1977, 1992) but it is clear that his formulation of discourse representation would in no way wish to exclude any symbolic means by which discourse representation may be accomplished.
If we return now to the responses to the tasks we gave the students, we can see that these responses are richly intertextual or polyvocal and that a wide range of discursive means are used to accomplish this polyvocality.
On the surface of it, the most surprising finding is that there are no examples of direct discourse in the total of 152 responses to the three tasks. This is, of course, the proto-typical form of quotation and in virtually all academic treatments of discourse representation, speech representation, projection or just quotation and citation it is the first and most extensively discussed means of representing other voices within texts. Yet in these 152 responses there are no direct quotations. There is some reason to believe that a cultural/linguistic factor could be at work. Li et al. (1993) noted in a contrastive study of Chinese and English news stories in Hong Kong that direct quotation was extremely rare in Chinese news sources whereas it was more commonly found in the corresponding English sources. Further, Yung (1995) found that English news sources in Hong Kong frequently use highly conventional direct quotation but Chinese sources display much variability in their practices. On the whole Yung's conclusion was that quotation marks, where they are used, are most frequently used to mark emphasis or to draw attention, not to mark the boundaries on embedded discourse.
Before rushing to this contrastive linguistic conclusion, however, it is important to ask whether it is likely that direct quotation would be used within the genre of a personal letter. While one can imagine someone writing
we do not have any data or other studies to clarify the expected frequency of direct quotation within the genre of personal letters. Our own intuitions suggest that it sounds a bit awkward and without further study of authentic personal letters it seems to us premature to try to draw any contrastive linguistic conclusions on this point.
In the first example, the discourse is represented as coming from a fictionalized reader who is represented as having asked this question. The second example draws more explicitly on the public discourse of the transition. While the attribution of the voice in the first case is specific (‘you’), the attribution in the second is more general, ‘many people’ filling the slot that might have named particular prominent individuals or institutions. While indirect discourse seems, with the exception of direct quotation, as having the best chance of delivering the appropriated voice ‘intact’, with a minimum of transformation by the writer, analyses of such issues as attribution indicate that writers still have considerable potential to color the voices they represent with this device.
Consistent with Yung's (1995) research, scare quotes are frequently used in these student responses. In these data, this is the only use of punctuation to mark appropriation.
I’m sure that the Chinese Government will not want to cease the prosperty of Hong Kong as Hong Kong means ‘a goose which lays gold eggs to her’!
Scare quotes are rather more subtle means of discourse
representation than either direct or indirect quotation as they can position
the fictionalized writer in relation to the utterance in a variety of ways.
They can, for example, create a distance between the writer and the voice that
has been appropriated either to highlight it as ‘authoritative’ (as in ‘a goose
which lays gold eggs to her’), or to highlight the euphemistic nature of the
voice and cast doubts upon it’s authoritativeness or authenticity (as in
‘methods’).
In the first of these examples, the voice of the other writer is embedded in a subordinated clause. In the second two cases the voice is appropriated in the presupposed ‘prosperity’ concept which is represented as a noun in one case and as a modifier in the second. Presupposition makes issues of discourse representation more ambiguous as one can never be sure how conscious writers are of the source of these voices in the discourse of others or of who these others are. A whole range of public discourse from television commercials to political speeches is awash with the term ‘prosperity’, for example, and its prevalence makes it difficult to pin down where students got it, or if they rather regard it as a universal, naturalized way of talking about the transition.
Negation, like presupposition, is also frequently used in these responses. In these cases it is implied that another voice has made an utterance with which the author disagrees.
Furthermore I am confident that democratization is a world trend and Hong Kong people will not be deprived of the rights they are enjoying now after 1997.
Like many of the other categories cited above, negation also gives writers a way to avoid naming the voices they appropriate. In addition, it points to the powerful forces in public discourse which help set the agenda of our students’ letters by posing the transition as a set of questions, possibilities and chances.
Hedges state the author's own point of view but at the same time place that point of view into another frame which qualifies that view in some way. In these two examples, 'really’ implies s/he might say otherwise in other occasions as does ‘frankly speaking’.
But I tell you what, I myself don’t really want to leave Hong Kong. People around are worrying about the future of Hong Kong. Nonetheless, I don’t really think so.
Hedging, appearing in both positive and negative assessments of Hong Kong’s future gives writers a chance to distance themselves from these assessments in a variety of ways. Even ‘frankly speaking’ and ‘really’ reserve the writer’s right to deny ownership of the assessment in other contexts.
We have already cited an example above which we repeat here in which the author cites an anonymous voice which has characterized Hong Kong people.
Again, who the characterizers may be is left ambiguous. Through the register invoked by the lexical choice (‘characterised’ rather than ‘called’) and the use of the passive voice, the writer confers on them an air of authority. They are the voice of ‘conventional wisdom’.
Quite a number of responses used paraphrase to represent other voices. In this example, both the original phrasing 'planned to immigrate' and the paraphrase 'like to go' are given.
Well, you asked me if I’ve planned to immigrate to Canada as well? Certainly, I would like to go because of the questionable future of Hong Kong.
While it is not a common means used in these responses, there are some cases of irony as this example indicates.
The author uses the word ‘stubborn’ about herself but immediately makes clear that she does not regard herself as being stubborn but motivated by other reasons. Furthermore, of course, she has hypothetically attributed this voicing to her correspondent. Like the use of ‘scare quotes’ discussed above, irony creates a distance between the writer and the words, showing how voices can be simultaneously appropriated and contested.
We have discussed the polyvocality of these texts so far from the point of view of intertextuality. That is, as texts or voices embedded within other utterances. Fairclough (1992) distinguishes between this level of appropriation for which he uses the word intertextuality from a broader kind of appropriation in which it is forms, styles, genres, registers, vocabulary sets, and other broad discourse types which are being appropriated, not just words, phrases and sentences. That is to say, the concept of interdiscursivity covers the appropriation of discursive frames as well as the texts themselves.
It is somewhat more difficult to trace interdiscursivity and its sources in people’s writing as it depends not on establishing a specific prior text but prior ‘conventions’ – packages of wordings, formats, styles and the like. Although it is often not hard to spot conventions of, for example, ‘medical’ talk in the language of doctors or ‘academic style’ in the talk of linguists, the problem is working out apriori systems (potentials) from which interdiscursive borrowings are made as these can rather easily slip into schemata, reified symbolic entities like languages or registers and the like.
Managing interdiscusivity may, in fact, constitute the greatest challenge to our students (and to us as teachers in assessing their writing), as the various discursive frames drawn upon in producing a text may themselves involve contradictory sets of generic and stylistic conventions, as well as conventions of voice appropriation, which writers must negotiate.
To our thinking the most fundamental and striking
interdiscursivity found in these texts is that all of them are written in
English. The task was to write three
letters, two of them as if from members of our students' parents’ generation
and one of them from our students themselves to a friend who has immigrated to
Vancouver. Within our student population
there are at most two or three who might have parents who are able to speak or
write any English. Our students are, of
course, bilingual (at least) in Cantonese and English. Nevertheless, we believed, and it was
confirmed in the tutorials, that none of them would write a personal letter to
a friend from Hong Kong in English. Much
less would their parents do so. That is,
the major form of interdiscursivity in these tasks and one which sets all of
the rest of our analysis into its brackets is that the language in which the
tasks were completed was appropriated from the situational frame of a
university lecture, an assignment given to them by an expatriate lecturer, and
an assignment given to them in English.
Thus throughout these assignments we hear the dominant, perhaps even
colonial voice of English ventriloquating (Wertsch, 1991, 1995) these other
voices.
Along with such broader evidence of interdiscursivity, the voice of the ‘classroom assignment’ is also manifested in more subtle ways, such as word choice within the texts. One example is the frequent use of such phrases as ‘strong future’, ‘future of Hong Kong looks good’, ‘questionable future’ and ‘doubtful future’ in students’ responses. If one looks at the original task assignment it will be clear that these phrases have most likely been appropriated directly from the task assignment. Thus in this intertextuality as well as in the interdiscursivity mentioned just above we see that the voice of the task assignment is a major voice to be found in these texts as part of their overall polyvocality as well as a major factor determining how other available voices are appropriated and represented.
The majority of the letters open and close with salutations and greetings. The style is chatty and informal. There are many personal or intimate references and even teasing as in the following excerpt which we have seen above:
It is clear from these 152 responses that the instruction ‘write a short personal letter’ is sufficient to cue the appropriation of a fairly complex generic pattern from opening and closing frames to internal style. Our students were quite able to call on this form of interdiscursivity in completing the tasks, and able to reproduce it within the constraints of the larger frame of the classroom assignment. Their ability to simultaneously manage both of these frames by producing not a ‘real letter’ but a representation of a letter fulfilling the demands of both the fictionalized reader (a friend) and the ‘actual reader’ (the foreign lecturer who set the assignment) already indicates a degree of sophistication in managing discourse representation perhaps even more demanding than the mechanical aspects of citation usually emphasized in writing classrooms.
There is yet another very powerful interdiscursivity in these letters beyond the discursive frames of ‘classroom task’ and ‘personal letter’ discussed above, and this is the discourse our overall research project is seeking to trace in the discourse of our students, the public discourse of Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese sovereignty. One finds throughout these 152 responses many appropriations of this public discourse, largely in the form of vocabulary and phraseology. We have phrases such as the following showing up again and again in these letters:
In our own analysis we marked these phrases as sounding very much unlike the language of our students. One can imagine alternatives such as the ‘success of Hong Kong’, ‘trade centre’, or ‘important city in the world’ as being closer to the personal and informal style of the letters.
One of the most frequently repeated phrases was ‘bright future’ used in speaking of the future of Hong Kong. This phrase is clearly appropriated from the public discourse regarding the post-transition period. While there is considerable debate about whether the original linguistic source of the phrase is English or more likely Chinese, this phrase is often found in television and newspaper reports, public debates and political speeches about the transition.
The extent to which such phrases constitute the voice of public discourse, and to which students were consciously drawing upon such discourses in constructing their own discourse of the transition, is impossible to judge by just examining the texts. Therefore, we decided to present the texts to the students in tutorial groups to find out whether and to what degree they themselves would mark such phrases as coming from another discourse.
Student Responses
Prior to the tutorial sessions, students were given a lecture outlining Fairclough’s (1992) formulation of the types of discourse representation, much like that given above. In the lecture we focused not so much on the sources that might be drawn upon as on the various ways writers linguistically signal voice appropriation, the aim of which was to provide them with a common language they could use in collaboratively analyzing their own texts. We did not include in the lecture the specific analysis we had made of their responses.
In the tutorial sessions we simply distributed samples of the 152 responses to the three tasks to small groups and asked the students to find whatever voices in the texts they might find, to indicate the linguistic means of discourse representation, and to make conjectures as to the possible sources of these various voices.
The results of these sessions were not only to confirm our analyses given above, but to suggest that there was much more polyvocality than we have suggested here.
Regarding those phrases we had marked as coming from public discourse about the transition, students for the most part confirmed this, indicating that many of these phrases were appropriated wholesale from newspapers and television. The phrase ‘bright future’ in particular, was attributed to media treatments of the transition, most students indicating Chinese as the linguistic source.
One of the most interesting observations was that what seemed to drive students to appropriate voices from the media seemed often to have more to do with the perceived currency of such language within the overall discourse of the transition rather than deliberate attempts to ratify or contest the ‘meanings’ embedded in the phrases. While they could appropriate such phrases as 'commercial entrepot' as someone else's language in the utterance of a fictionalized author, for example, we could not locate any student who could say what the phrase might mean.
This raises the question of what might be called degrees of appropriation. Kamberelis and Scott (1992) speak of the ‘adoption’ of a voice by which they mean that a voice, in the sense of an ideology, is taken on fully by the user as his or her own voice. Wertsch (1997) has articulated a distinction between what he calls ‘mastery’ and ‘appropriation’. Mastery in this sense means coming to control cultural tools with a high degree of competence but without taking on those tools as one’s own, that is, without identifying with them. Under this distinction, Wertsch would use ‘appropriation’ to signal what Kamberelis and Scott have called ‘adoption’. That is, Wertsch would speak of what our students are doing in this latter case as mastery, not appropriation. They have shown that they can easily write such phrases as ‘commercial entrepot’ and use these phrases quite accurately within a discussion of the historical positioning of Hong Kong. They have mastered their use but the tutorial discussions indicate that they have not appropriated them.
Most significantly, the students argued that Task C was considerably more complex than we believed it to be. The task was:
Write a short letter which first gives your opinion about the future prospects for Hong Kong and which then gives your reasons for your opinion.
Students clearly understood the distinction between the author of the letters and the writer. That is, in Tasks A and B they clearly understood that the voice uttering 'I' was the voice fictionalized as that of a member of their parents' generation, not the writer's own voice. They went on to argue that the voice articulating 'I' in Task C was no more the voice of the student writer in our lecture than it was in the first two tasks. They told us that at least in most cases, it was a fictionalized second year BAEPC student in our lecture doing an assigned task as if it were his or her own voice. They argued that until they had been given the assignment on the first day of class and were asked to set in writing, they did not have an opinion and thus an opinion had to be fictionalized along with the voice uttering it.
The significance of individuals claiming to have no opinion about what is arguably the most significant political and social event of their lives is itself an important focus for our continuing study. One line of argument which could be made is that this constitutes a systematic colonization of the political discourse by other, supplanting or distracting discourses. Chun (1996) argues, for example, that specific government policies in Hong Kong over the past several decades have constructed discourses of entertainment and fashion as ways of drawing public attention away from the construction of historical narratives inimical to colonial interests. Zhu (1992; Zhu, Zhao, & Li, 1990) has argued in a similar way that the discourses of entertainment and especially sports have served this same function in China. It might be argued, then, that for our students, their lack of opinion has been positioned by larger hegemonic discourses.
It might further be argued that in accord with the hierarchical social relationships of Hong Kong society, young people are not expected to voice opinions. On the contrary they are expected to seek opinions from senior members of the society. While there is much to be said for these arguments, it is also possible to advance an argument that our students’ use of history has shifted from the narrative positioning of society and of themselves to a focus upon events, that the historical transition from British to Chinese sovereignty is not conceptualized by them as a point through which a historical narrative flows from the past and on into their futures as it is for corresponding contemporaries in Estonia and the former East Germany (Ahonen, 1997). In contrast it could be argued that the reunification has been conceptualized as an event not unlike the World Cup or the Olympics—something which occurs at a specific time and has a specific duration (Scollon & Scollon, 1997; Jones et al., 1997). It is not that this event does not have consequences for intertextuality, interdiscursivity and personal identity. Students do recount where they were and with whom as they experienced the change ‘live’ on television. It might be argued that their use of this historical event, not narrative, is much in keeping with the multiple but to some extent transient interdiscursivities of post-modernism and that their claim to having no opinion in advance of the event may reflect a stance of post-modern cool distance which is itself appropriated from the media of popular culture.
Perhaps, as suggested by Ivanic (1997) it is important to recall Goffman’s (1974) reminder that people take on all sorts of stances in relation to what they say to each other. They not only quote, they misquote—intentionally. They not only appropriate texts from the discourses of their time, they misappropriate them as plagiarists. We would argue that we need to consider a second set of cross-cutting relationships of text to utterer. Perhaps any of the terms we have used above—intertextuality, interdiscursivity—could be used in one of some indefinite number of stances (used in the Goffmanesque sense of frame) as follows:
1. animating [Kamberelis and Scott’s (1992) ‘stylization’]: performing a text as mere or pure text without any personal investment in meanings at all. Kamberelis and Scott suggest the metaphor of children trying on their parents’ clothes which, though they are far too big, they wear while pretending to be grownups. Perhaps some of our students’ writing is not very different from this.
2. authoring [Wertsch’s (1997) ‘mastery’]: crafting a text including the placement of other texts within it but without taking on any personal investment in meanings or social positionings. Writers do a lot of this as do secretaries, drafters of government publications and so forth.
3. principalling [We would want a verb here for Goffman’s noun ‘principal’—Wertsch’s (1997) ‘appropriation’; Kamberelis and Scott’s ‘adoption’]: getting behind the text; taking responsibility for it, for its intertextuality, for its positionings. Saying what you mean and living with it. We would argue that many analysts tend to act as if this is the ‘normal’ stance. Students of Goffman might doubt that it ever happens.
4. Parodying [Kamberelis and Scott]: Often enough we set up ‘straw men’; literature and conversation is full of this. Taking on the position of someone, producing their text and getting a laugh out of it.
5. Hidden polemic [Kamberelis and Scott]: Attacking a position which is never set up (within the text being analyzed). This is similar to Fairclough’s ‘negation’ as discourse representation though much more generally conceived.
6. Containment [Goffman’s (1974) term]: Duping, putting a frame around one’s own earnest or honest text or that of someone else so that the others do not see the frame. Crossing your fingers behind your back. Saying things so that looked at in another light it can all be taken back or dodged. We suspect this is the primary frame in, say, medical discourse or legal discourse though many analysts would frame their own analysis as denying this.
This list could be continued without either a fixed number of entries nor clear demarcations among them. For our purposes here, perhaps the most important thing we can conclude from our students’ claims is that students’ sensitivity to polyvocality and ventriloquation in academic writing tasks is far more complex and deliberate than many teachers and analysts imagine.
This study is preliminary in the sense that we have little we can say at this stage about how our students appropriate the voices of the Hong Kong public discourses of transition. That they do appropriate these voices seems clear, but the considerable polyvocality of voices we have just described indicates that much work remains to be done if we are to come to understand not only that complex processes of appropriation and discourse representation are working but also how and with what significance.
It is clear that one of the most powerful voices speaking in these texts is the colonial voice of English. We now need to ask to what extent that voice is speaking of a different transition than the discourses of transition being spoken in Chinese. To accomplish this we are conducting studies of the public discourse sources of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, of students' views of these sources and their purposes in appropriation, and we are also studying students’ linguistic resources for discourse representation. Also, because another very powerful voice in the writing is the academic voice of the assignment, much care will need to be taken to ensure that we are ultimately not just hearing our own voices in this research.
What we believe this research does make clear is that our students’ writing, even on rather artificial tasks such as the ones assigned here, displays considerable intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Some better than others, of course, are able to integrate this polyvocality with considerable discursive finesse. Finally, the responses in the tutorial sessions indicate that they are quite skilled at hearing and talking about the multiple voices within their own discourses. This leads us to believe that the rather commonly stated concern that our students do not know how to do quotation and citation correctly is somewhat misplaced. We believe that our own analyses of the social practices of discourse representation must reflect a level of complexity compatible with the already considerable analytical skills of our students.
Notes
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[1]
Paper first presented at the Public Discourse Research Group, Department of
English, City University of Hong Kong, 18 November 1996. We wish to thank the participants in that
group for insightful comments and criticism from which this paper has
substantially benefited. The research on
which this study is based is supported by City
University Strategic Research Grant ‘Discourses of Transition: Authoritative
History in the Making’,
[2] This original formulation of the dialogicality or polyvocality of text arrived in western academic circles through the writings of Kristeva (1986a, b), Vološinov (1986), and through Uspensky’s (1973) influence on Goffman (1974). Samuel Beckett (1992), however, formulated the same concept, albeit in literary form as early as 1932 in his posthumously published novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Scollon and Scollon, in Press).
[3] For ease of exposition we have used the singular here but it should be recalled that the individuality of the utterer is significantly problematized within this analytical framework.