Chapter 6- "Writing and the Sea of Voices"

Chapter 6
“Writing and the Sea of Voices: Oral Language In, Around, and About Writing”

Dyson discussion takes the reader through a young writer’s inner speech that mediates the writing process. Children generate their ideas and writing through talk with others. She brings us through the writings of a 6 year old.
• Depending on their orientations researchers analyzed how language was acquired and utilized. Through observations, studies yield various concepts in examining the ‘sea of talk’, how speech functions during composing and how it relates to social relationships and culture. Researchers developed ways to code and describe functions of speech during early writing. Young children talked while in the development of their inner speech.
• Talk is self-regulatory; it is the raw material and a tool to manipulate written material. It is used for regulating, planning, encoding, monitoring, orally rereading, etc.
• As two girls work on a writing project, they use speech to manipulate speech. They verbalize their tactics in a way that models the scaffolding that an adult has provided. Based on Vygotskian theory, researchers consider the dyadic encounters between students/teachers that have provided the ‘think alouds’ that support children’s language, both orally and written. Many times this scaffolding is provided during an activity called ‘writing conferences’. These conferences center around ‘versions of reflect, expand and select.’ But what if, in the classroom, all children don’t share sociocultural backgrounds with their teachers. As researchers and educators stepped back from dyadic encounters, there came into question ethnographic perspectives on language and literacy in communities and on social activities or events themselves.
• Formal social activities or events provide conventions of how to act and what to do with and through texts that are passed on orally. Informal events reveal and sustain social relationships. When any events talk about or use print, they are known as literacy events. They have a purpose, a way of relating to others, expected moods, expected test topics and structures.
• This shift from dyadic encounters to literacy events requires rethinking oral or written language to the relationship of learning to write. In dyadic instructional encounters, an ‘expert’ helps learners to write, hoping that the learner will eventually internalize the skills and become independent. In events, there may be many participants with many different roles and may not ‘disappear’ and leave the writer alone, but change within the relationship or nature of event.
• Learning through events requires numerous social activities and participating by listening, observing, receiving explicit instruction, engaging in the event with an expert and receiving feedback from an ‘audience’.
• But classrooms themselves are a kind of community and don’t necessarily follow the dyadic encounters. There can be a ‘collective’ zone of proximal development molded by diverse events in different study units. Learning entails both interactive use of oral and written language. Text talk is guided by oral participation.
• However, classrooms resort to the ‘default’ teach/student interaction and continue to provide minimal support for classroom writing or composing. Students write short, factual information that is not exchanged, elaborated or integrated. There is a ‘right’ way and a ‘wrong’ way. Teachers that embraced high social activities and active participation in the classrooms such as play-acting or writing produced enriched writing. Students saw that their writing had a purpose and the activities became socially organized events.
• As children increase writing, their talk and drawings as well as peers themselves, began to permeate through their writings. They may not always heep their writing in an official capacity but sometimes allow their unofficial or sociocultural ‘culture’ to seep through.
• As children evolve in their writing, there comes a point where ‘Critical literacy’ practices begin to grow. These practices involve separating themselves from their writing, making decisions about what particular words to choose or how to use them. They begin to become aware of social and ideological alternatives eventually making ‘waves’ in the sea.
• As writers begin to taste other voices in the sea, their words/voices/writing begin to absorb the various flavors. Teachers can provide a sea of voices in their classrooms by offering various voices or sources in a unit of study (i.e., paintings, songs, books, plays, videos, etc.) All of these various activities create a collective zone of voices about writing.