DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2017.789
title: Exploring voice in Thai EFL students’ paragraphs

description: The metaphoric ‘voice’ is germane to good writing, textual quality, and the critical elements in writing instruction and assessment, and advanced academic literacy in a native (L1) English speaking context. The notion of voice, thus, has attracted particular attention among L1 composition scholars and researchers. However, there is still little empirical evidence of the construction of voice among L2 student writers, especially in EFL contexts. Drawing from 70 actual writing samples of opinion and narrative paragraphs, 35 learning reflections written by Thai EFL student writers from two independent groups in conjunction with the course syllabus, quantitative methods of content analysis were employed in this study to scrutinize whether Thai EFL students’ written paragraphs show the voice features indicated in the modified rubric, to examine differences between the group of students who were explicitly aware of voice and the group of students who may not have been aware of voice, and to investigate how different text types influence voice in students’ written products.      Overall, in opinion paragraphs, the results clearly revealed that student writers in Group 1 who were explicitly aware of voice wrote with a comparatively stronger voice and employed a wider variety of voice features than those in Group 2, who might not have been aware of voice. The statistically significant difference between the compared groups was 0.05. Overall, there were statistical differences between the writing scores of student writers from each group in overall voice strength (p = 0.025), in Dimension 2:  manner of idea presentation (p = 0.001) and Dimension 3: writer and reader presence (p = 0.001), respectively. However, there was no significant difference between the writing scores of student writers in Dimension 1: presence and clarity of ideas in the content (p = 0.206).      Due to the fact that this current study primarily intends to explore voice in writing by employing the modified analytic rubric of Zhao (2012), it is unfortunate that the modified rubric does not seem to capture voice features that belong to the nature of narrative writing, especially Dimension 1 (presence and clarity of ideas in the content), which assesses the reiteration and directives of written products. This occurs because text types greatly influence voice in students’ written products. That is, purpose, register and text structure are the divide between narrative and opinion paragraphs (Coffin, Curry, Goodman, Lillis, & Swann, 2003). Although the modified analytic rubric cannot be appropriately applied to assess voice in narrative paragraphs, possible voice features found in the writing samples will be discussed in detail in Chapters 4 and 5.      This study may serve as a starting point for conducting research on written voice in the EFL context. Apart from shedding light on written voice expressed by EFL student writers, the researcher also hopes that this current study will make the intangible notion of voice more accessible and more easily captured in written discourse. In addition, the results from this study may yield some important implications for L2 writing instruction and assessment and be useful for EFL writing teachers and, in particular, EFL student writers.