Towards a sociocultural understanding of children's voice

Abstract

While 'voice' is frequently invoked in discussions of pupils' agency and empowerment, less attention has been paid to the dialogic dynamics of children's voices and the sociocultural features shaping their emergence. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic research involving recent recordings of ten and eleven year-old children's spoken language experience across the school day, this article examines how pupils' voices are configured within institutional interactional contexts which render particular kinds of voice more or less hearable, and convey different kinds of value. Analysis shows how children appropriate and reproduce the authoritative voices of education, popular culture and parents in the course of their induction into social practices. At the same time they also express varying degrees of commitment to these voices and orchestrate their own and other people's voices within accounts and anecdotes, making voice appropriation an uneven, accumulative process shot through with the dynamics of personal and peer-group experience. The examination of children's dialogue from different contexts across the school day highlights the situated semiotics of voice and the heteroglossic development of children's speaking consciousness. IntroductionIn his vision for a good society, Dell Hymes suggests that the concept of 'voice' should combine two kinds of freedom: 'freedom to have one's voice heard, freedom to develop a voice worth hearing. ' (1996: 64). While this would seem an eminently worthwhile goal, however, such freedoms are not as straightforward as they might at first sight appear. The 'freedom to develop a voice worth hearing' is affected in complex ways by children's access to and positioning within institutionally configured conversations, interactions and encounters with diverse texts, as indeed is the freedom to have their voice heard. While 'voice' has been frequently invoked in discussions of identity, agency and empowerment, less attention has been paid to the dialogic nature of its emergence and the sociocultural dynamics which shape the views children put forwards, and the responses they experience. In this article I therefore take a step back to examine some of the ways in which children experience and express voice in their everyday spoken language across the school day. I define 'voice' as speaking consciousness (Bakhtin, 1981) together with a speaker's 'capacity to make themselves understood by others' (Blommaert, 2005: 255). However, I also see voice or, more accurately, voicing, as intrinsically dialogic, incorporating elements of addressivity and responsivity both in relation to speakers in a specific interaction and also in relation to voices from past experience and in the surrounding environment (Bakhtin, 1981; Volosinov 1973 Volosinov , 1976.In the next section below I explain my use of the concept of dialogicality, and go on to discuss how I combine Bakhtinian theory with ethnography and ideas from linguistic anthropology about indexicality (Ochs, 1996;Agha, 2005; Blommaert, 2006)....

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