Voice in Adolescents' Informational Writing

Voice is a key component of interpersonal meaning that denotes a writer's value judgement or personal feelings. An important aspect of voice in informational writing is epistemic stance, which indicates a writer's judgement of the information presented. This exploratory study examined adolescents' use of hedges and boosters to convey epistemic stance in their informational writing. Ninety-three seventh-grade and ninth-grade students from one American public school were asked to write a science report on crocodilia for a peer audience. The writing corpus was coded for the presence of linguistic markers of hedges and boosters. Statistical analysis reveals that the students as a whole used significantly more boosters than hedges and that there was no significant difference between the two grade levels in the use of hedges or boosters. Moreover, the students drew heavily on everyday language resources to instantiate either hedges or boosters, and there was a lack of lexical diversity in their linguistic choices. These findings suggest that adolescent learners were able to infuse voice in their informational writing but needed to expand their linguistic repertoires for instantiating voice in order to develop advanced literacy.