52 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 44 August 2009 52 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 44, Number 1, August 2009 Beth Lewis Samuelson Indiana University, Bloomington Ventriloquation in Discussions of Student Writing: Examples from a High School English Class This study examines discussions of model papers in a high school Advanced Placement English classroom where students were preparing for a high-stakes writing assessment. Much of the current research on talk about writing in various contexts such as classroom discourse, teacher-student writing conferences, and peer tutoring has emphasized the social and constructive nature of in- structional discourse. Building on this work, the present study explored how talk about writing also takes on a performative function, as speakers accent or point to the features of the context that are most significant ideologically. Informed by perspectives on the emergent and mediated nature of discourse, this study found that the participants used ventriloquation to voice the as- pects of the essays that they considered to be most important, and that these significant chunks were often aphorisms about the test essay. The teacher frequently ventriloquated raters, while the students often ventriloquated themselves or the teacher. The significance of ventriloquation is not just that it helps to mediate the generic conventions of timed student essays; it also mediates social positioning by helping the speakers to present themselves and others in flexible ways. This study also raises questions about the ways that ventriloquation can limit the ways that students view academic writing. Ventriloquation Bakhtin’s applications of voicing and dialogicality to the study of the novel have been widely understood to describe the heteroglossia inherent in all utterances. According to Bakhtin, “the living utterance [. . .] cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 276). As a specialized type of voicing, ventriloquation occurs when a speaker speaks through the voice of another for the purpose of social or interactional positioning (Wertsch, 1991; Wortham, 2001a). Bakhtin (1981) described the situation as follows: The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.