ABSTRACT
Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 294).
This finding, keeping, and expressing writer voice is especially difficult for upper-grade students when their writing involves research (Fletcher, 1993). Yet, despite the fact that most schooling requires that students do writing to learn, little research has addressed the complex enterprise of how students learn to write about a specific topic for an extended period of time (Many, Fyfe, Lewis, & Mitchell, 1996; Tierney, Soter, O’Flahavan, & McGinley, 1989). Moreover, research writing does not just impart information, it also conveys something about the writer, yet studies that focus on the construction of discoursal writer identities in producing this type of text have also been sparse (Ivanic, 1994).
