Speaking Personalities in Primary School Children's L2 Writing

This article explores the complex relationship between L2 writing and identity construction through an examination of ESL learners' journal writing. We adopt a constructivist, sociocultural-historical framework to examine the discourses, texts, and voices of three 8-year-old Muslim girls as they learn English, their third language, in a culturally diverse primary school in urban Montreal, Canada. To understand how writing intersects with identity construction, we draw on Ivanic's (1998) threeway interplay among the writers' life experience, the reality constructed through their writing, and their personal sense of self. Bakhtin's (1986) concept of speaking personality offers a means of conceptualizing children's biliteracy as socioculturally mediated activities and social interactions. By focusing on constructs such as the writers' agency, identity, voice, and reflexivity, we present a multidimensional model that places a child's speaking personality at the center of the language learning process. Writing stories is learning. It's really helpful because you can use your imagination. The more you write, the more you learn how to write. It's like speaking, the more you speak, the more you can learn how to speak. (Heddie, age 9; interview, 1996) I would have them [children learning an L2] look at books and... after they could read, I would tell them to look at all kinds of stories and then pick a little part of this story and a little part of that story. Like a girl that's named Rosie and a girl that's named I don't know, whatever, and then they meet each other. It's like two books connecting each other so they have to use their imaginations. (Heddie, age 6; interview, 1993)