The Use of Personal Pronouns in Academic Writing Pdf

Introduction

The purpose of the study detailed in this article is to describe the use of personal pronouns by EFL writers in their writing of argumentative essays and to suggest a pedagogical approach to their teaching. The use of personal pronouns, in particular, the use of I and we, are often believed to be contrary to the requirements of objectivity and formality in academic writing. However, although varying between disciplines, a number of studies (Chang and Swales, 1999; Harwood, 2006 and Hyland, 2001, 2002) have shown the importance of such pronouns in helping the writer state opinions and arguments and, generally, organize an academic text. Hyland (2004: 143) wrote that 'self-mention¹ plays a crucial role in mediating the relationship between writers' arguments and the expectations of their readers'. Their importance is shown by the amount of research that has focussed on them, particularly in regards to disciplinary differences and native and non-native writers. However, as this article will examine the writing of non-native speakers, the next section will focus on the literature in regards to this area.

The Use of Personal Pronouns by Non-native Speakers in Academic Writing

Hyland (2002) examined the use of personal pronouns in 64 Hong Kong undergraduate theses and compared them with a corpus of research articles. The corpus of student writing consisted of final project reports. These reports included a review of the literature, a primary research project, analysis of the results, and a presentation of the findings. The reports were collected from a number of different disciplines and they were then compared with a corpus of expert writing from research articles in journals. Hyland found that the student writers in his study were reluctant to use personal pronouns as they believed that they showed too much authority and personal commitment. They were aware of the disciplinary practices of their communities but, instead of reflecting this in their writing as Samraj (2008) suggests, it caused them to underuse personal pronouns as they did not want to appear as authoritative as the expert writers in their disciplines.

The writers in Hyland's student corpus were undergraduate writing final project reports whereas Samraj's corpus consisted of Master's theses so the student writers' level of experience in academic writing and socialization in their respective disciplines may have contributed to the differences in the findings. However, while Samraj's findings are based purely on an analysis of the corpus, Hyland also interviewed the student writers in his study. These interviews provide valuable insights into the reasoning behind the writers' use of personal pronouns, for example:

I have seen "we" and "I" in academic papers but it is a good writer, isn't it? They have confidence to give their ideas clearly. Their own ideas (Social Studies student, Hyland, 2002: 1109).

These results seem to support Tang and John's findings (1999) that student writers lack the confidence to use a more powerful authorial presence. Moreover, as Hyland's study involved different genres, research reports and journal articles, it shows that there are different generic conventions in the use of personal pronouns.

Hyland (2002) also identified the different functions of personal pronouns and their frequencies. This is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Functions and Examples of Personal Pronouns.

This taxonomy was then used to examine the discourse functions of personal pronouns in the reports (student writing) and research articles (expert writing). The frequencies are shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Discourse Functions of Personal Pronouns and Their Frequencies in Student Reports and Research Articles.

Table 2 shows that the two most frequent uses of personal pronouns in the student reports were stating a purpose and explaining a procedure. Hyland states these functions are less risky as they are simply organizing the text or presenting their methodological procedure. This is supported by the interviews with students:

"I" is suitable for organizing the report, we are just saying about the research not about the ideas. It is only about the intention of the research and this is ok (Economics student) (Hyland, 2002: 1101).

However, in contrast, the more risky functions, elaborating an argument and stating results and claims, which are seen as being more assertive, are used more frequently by the expert writers. This preference for author invisibility was made clear in the student interviews:

I don't want to make myself important. Of course, it is my project and my result, but I am just ordinary student. Not an academic scholar with lots of knowledge and confident for myself (TESL student) (Hyland, 2002: 1105).

Another possible reason given is Ohta's (1991) suggestion that the use of first person pronouns is largely unacceptable in Asian cultures where a collective identity is more valued than individuality. This dichotomy between Western and Eastern culture is often stressed in the literature of Applied Linguistics, but it has also been criticized as being too simplistic. As Kubota (1999: 14) argues, 'The assumption underlying this approach is that there is a systematic, culturally determined way in which all members in a certain culture, think, behave and act'. Indeed Tang and John (1999) and Hyland (2002) have shown there is a continuum of usage which is not systematic and that student writers do use personal pronouns but in different ways to expert writers. Their research has indicated that students use 'I' but favour uses which possibly background their presence and are less 'risky'. Also of particular relevance to this theme is Natsukari (2012), who compared the argumentative essays of British and American undergraduates with their Japanese counterparts' writing in English and discovered that the Japanese students overused 'I'. It is too simplistic to state that students from a particular cultural background will use personal pronouns in the same way in their second language and the research underlines this. This variety of usage, which cannot simply be culturally determined, again supports the case for going to the source and asking the students why they make particular pragmatic choices.

Methodology

This article examines the use of personal pronouns in the writing of argumentative essays by a group of 17 Japanese university students over the course of a 14-week semester. This longitudinal case study examines the learner's development and performance over a period of time, rather than just synchronically at one point in time. This duration allowed me to collect data which reflects 'natural changes in the learner's behavior and knowledge, influenced by numerous possible factors, such as the environment, physical maturation, cognitive development, and schooling' (Duff, 2008: 41).

Data Collection

In the first stage, I interviewed the participants to discover what experiences of writing the students already had, the kinds of writing they had done, and what they remember about the instruction they had previously received.

The second stage was a corpus of three argumentative essays written over the course of the 14-week semester by the 17 participants. The final corpus of 44,674 words was then manually coded for personal pronouns. Also, to increase reliability a second coder independently coded the corpus.

Finally, in order to help discover the writers' intentions and motivations behind their particular language choices, verbal protocol analysis (VPA) and retrospective, stimulated-recall interviews were conducted.

Results and Discussion

The raw data in Table 3 highlights that the first person pronoun 'I' was used much more frequently by the participants with 90% of all cases. However, there was a big variation in the use of personal pronouns by the participants; Aya, Chikasa, and Maki used 58% of all the personal pronouns used in the corpus, and Ran, Yoko, Sakura and Jeemin did not use any. This variation can also be seen when the different essays are examined as 65% of all of the personal pronouns used were in Essay 1.

Table 3. Total Number of Personal Pronouns Used per Essay per Student.

In terms of expert writing, Hyland (2001) has highlighted that there were disciplinary differences when he examined the use of personal pronouns in a variety of disciplines, but his corpora of expert writing was not the same genre as my corpus. Indeed, expert writers will be much more aware of the disciplinary demands of their respective communities and their feelings about the use of personal pronouns.

In terms of student writing, more specifically an 'essay',²Ädel (2006) compared three corpora of essays written by university students in Sweden, the United States and Britain. Ädel (2006) found that the Swedish EFL students used more first person singular pronouns than their counterparts in the United States and Britain. This is similar in my corpus of essays where the students possibly felt more freedom to signal their presence in their writing with the use of a first person pronoun.

The difference between the numbers of personal pronouns used in the essays may have been caused to some extent by the topics. In my corpus there were three essays and the topics – university students having part-time jobs, illegal drugs, and individualism – appeared to cause differing patterns of personal pronoun usage. For example, in the first essay when the topic was university students having part-time jobs, there were more personal pronouns used as the students had personal experience which they could use to support their position. When they did not have this personal experience, for example, in the second essay when the topic was illegal drugs, they used fewer personal pronouns. The two paragraphs below from Maki highlight this effect:

Since I work as a waiter, I count money very carefully and when I worked as a tutor, I taught students English so clear that I actually learned English. Then, the same kind of responsibility applied to my college studies. For instance, when I received a difficult assignment on Friday that was due next Tuesday, I thought I was too busy to finish it. I had to work on Saturday and Monday night and had a plan with friends on Sunday. Yet, I figured out that students' first responsibility was studying. So I apologized to my friends and postponed the day to go out with them. The responsibility enables me to put emphasis on studying (Essay 1, Maki).

Next, since Japanese conceal using or possessing drugs well, it is getting difficult to arrest drug users. For example, some head shops in Tokyo and Osaka legally used to sell drugs for between 16 and 100 dollars that are labeled as a class A narcotics in the U.S. Furthermore, the police cannot arrest people if they claim that they do not know the effect of illegal drugs. While it is illegal to traffic, sell and consume magic mushroom, it is not illegal if you claim that you do not know that it is illegal. In other words, when you take magic mushroom but you say that you eat it as food, there is nothing that police can do. Moreover, people can buy drugs from the Internet and telephone. In April 2010, two men were charged with buying prescription psychotropic medications from people prescribed the drugs and then selling them over the Internet to recreational users. As people can use and conceal illegal drugs easily, police finds it difficult to improve the situation of Japanese illegal drugs (Essay 2, Maki).

In the first paragraph of the essay on part-time jobs Maki uses her personal experience to provide evidence to support her ideas. There are 13 examples of the first-person pronoun 'I', which can be contrasted with the second paragraph, of the essay on illegal drugs, where she used secondary sources to support her argument and used no personal pronouns at all.

Another factor was the students' level of writing experience. Participants who had received more instruction and had more experience of academic writing generally used fewer personal pronouns. In the following paragraph written by Yoko in Essay 1, she writes generally about 'students' and avoids using a pronoun to give a personal example to exemplify her position that part-time jobs can help students to learn responsibility. She had three years of academic writing experience and during this time had been told never to use personal pronouns in her essays.

Secondly, students succeed in their college studies with part-time jobs because they feel more responsible. Since students know that their part-time jobs cannot be an excuse for the decline of academic results and handing assignments late, they feel they have to do their academic tasks on time and properly. At the same time, students know that they cannot quit part-time jobs easily because of academic tasks. Therefore, they try to manage their time and do reasonable work on both, assignments and jobs. Moreover, since they will have to get a job after four years anyway, having a part-time job could be like a practice before entering the real world. Accordingly, students learn to be responsible for what they do and become careful about their time management. Some opponents might say part-time job is not the only way to make students feel responsible, but they can also learn to be responsible through school work such as group work or belonging to clubs, so they should not have a part-time job. However, doing a part-time job and learning what it is like to earn money are important experiences which they can only do while at school. They can learn how hard it is to earn money and appreciate the value of money at the same time. Consequently, doing a part-time job does not disturb students' college life, but it rather widens students' viewpoints (Essay 1, Yoko).

In fact, Yoko used strategies to avoid the use of a personal pronoun as was revealed by the think-aloud data. In Essay 1 she wrote:

Students' schedule gets busier with part-time jobs because they have to sacrifice their free time after school, but because they get busy they plan ahead and can do their tasks faster. For example, when a student knows that they have a part-time job on Monday night and the deadline of an assignment is on Tuesday, they realise that they have to finish the assignment on a weekend at the latest.

And during the think-aloud she said:

Should I give an example? Can I write about me? Can I use "I"? But it's an example…

The guidance she previously received from her teachers caused her to change to make the example impersonal even though the information is about her own experience.

The other personal pronouns in the corpus were mainly used to state the writer's opinion about the topic, for example:

Therefore, I believe students should not work part time (Sawako, Essay 1).

It might take long time, but I hope someday people will use marijuana as a medicine but not illegal drugs (Shota, Essay 2).

Or to organize the text for the reader:

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, some people believe that having a part-time job would likely lead to academic difficulties (Yunina, Essay 1).

The second point, that I want to make is that in America, where individualism is encouraged (according to the website, "American Hospitals.com, American Values", "the one values that nearly every American would agree upon is individual freedom."), students freely express themselves in school (Yuka, Essay 2).

However, there are two things I need to tell you about it (Aya, Essay 3).

The first example from Yunina is different to the other two from Yuka and Aya as she is reminding the reader of something that was written before. In the other two examples Yuka and Aya are introducing the topic that will be discussed to the reader. However, these examples are all signalling the writer's intention and providing structure for the text. In order to understand more about the use of personal pronouns in the corpus, these discourse functions will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

Discourse Function of Personal Pronouns

As was discussed earlier Hyland (2002: 1100–106) suggested a classification of discourse functions (see Table 1). There were no examples of expressing self-benefits or acknowledgements and this is not surprising as they are not usually associated with essays and are more likely in the type of research papers looked at in Hyland's study. Similar results were also found by Tang and John (1999) in their examination of the essays of Singaporean university students where they point out that while such activities are necessary for large-scale research projects, they are not part of the normal essay writing procedure.

Table 4 shows the discourse functions of the personal pronouns used in the essays contained in my corpus. It is clear that two functions – stating results/claims and elaborating an argument – were by far the most used; they made up 97.1% of all the examples used.

Table 4. Discourse Function of the Personal Pronouns Used in the Corpus.

The participants in my study had much more freedom to express themselves with the use of a pronoun to state their claim and elaborate their argument by giving a personal example. In the stimulated-recall interviews there was data which gave some of the reasons as to why this was so. For example, in Essay 1, Chikasa recalled:

IV

³Right. The first paragraph; first of all, college students should be responsible for their money. You use quite a few, like, 'I's and 'my'. How did you feel about that? Because, like, when we talked before, I think you probably said that your teachers before had said to never use 'I' in your essays.

IV

Yes, because you used 'I' a lot.

IV

How did you… how did you feel about that? Was it strange or…?

IE

Yes, kind of strange but… it's about my experience so I couldn't change I to a different word, yes.

Chikasa's previous writing teacher instructed her not to use 'I' in academic writing but because her task required her to give her personal opinion on the topic of part-time jobs, and she had personal experience to support her ideas, Chikasa used 'I' in her writing.

In my corpus, as previously stated, the writers had more confidence to express themselves as that was part of the task requirement, whereas in Hyland's corpus the writers were more reluctant to show their authority as they believed that was not appropriate in their genre for 'student' writers. This reluctance to commit was different to some of the writers in my corpus but not all. As can be seen from Table 3, four students did not use a single personal pronoun and this is certainly due to previous instruction in academic writing when they had been told that the use of 'I' was not appropriate.

The previous teaching the students had received affected their use of personal pronouns but the affect was not uniform as Table 5 illustrates.

Table 5. Students' Previous Instruction about the Use of Personal Pronouns.

Table 5 shows the results of the preliminary interviews in which I asked students about the instruction they had received in regards to personal pronouns. The chart shows that ten of the participants had received instruction that discouraged the use of personal pronouns but that seven participants had used them in the corpus. Moreover, as the other three students did not use a single personal pronoun in the corpus, it highlights that the effect of this instruction was not constant.

This variation is also highlighted in data from the stimulated-recall interviews when I asked Aya about the use of 'I' in the first essay:

IV

Did you find a problem doing that or what? Because you're using your example when you're using I, which is not a problem with that, but when we talked before you said your teacher told you not to use I in your essays so…

IV

But you used I here a lot…

IE

I just want to use my like specific example and maybe I should be like, I don't know, more [in Japanese…what…the Japanese won't come out!].

IE

I don't know how to say in Japanese and English either…like… [Japanese spoken]. Like if I use I… like you is like a more objective, objectively, but it is more, subject…

IE

Subjective… I thought it is kind of more strong example.

IV

Okay that's interesting.

IE

Specific… you… if I use you like it sounds really objective, that's… yeah I thought objectively, object, yeah you know what I mean?

Aya is clearly aware of the issue of objectivity in regards to the use of pronouns in academic writing but, as the extract shows, is confused about particular pronouns and the perceived degree of their objectivity/subjectivity. This variety in the use of personal pronouns by the students in the study is understandable, especially taking into account the different types of instruction they had previously received in high school. For example, Yuki explained that:

IE

Oh, they said like I shouldn't use 'you'

IV

Okay, but 'I' and 'we' were okay?

IE

Not really, but better than 'you'

And Shota:

The teacher told me that, like, in the opinion essay, like a persuasive essay, it's kind of acceptable to use those pronouns, I guess, like the "I"…but in the history essay, the teacher never let me use "I"…only in the conclusion. But the teacher didn't recommend me to use "I" that much because it's a fact, it's a research paper so…

Therefore, before they started university, the instructions they received about the use of personal pronouns in academic writing seemed to cause a degree of confusion amongst the students and could account for the differences in their use between individual students.

The traditional, positivist approach to research has encouraged a uniform objectivity consequently discouraging the use of personal pronouns, but as Tang and John (1999: S26) have written, 'the first person pronoun in academic writing is not a homogeneous entity, and there is a range of roles or identities that may be fronted by a first person pronoun'. It is too simple and too easy for teachers to tell their students not to use personal pronouns. We need to find ways to help students to see how this important feature of writing can be used to foster, not hinder, their identity as an academic writer.

Pedagogical Implications of the Study

One potential approach which might help learners develop a more pragmatic understanding of the use of personal pronouns could be 'noticing'. In 1997, in their study of hedges and boosters in students' writing, Hyland and Milton suggested explicit instruction of the epistemic devices used as hedges and boosters such as 'noticing' could help the acquisition of the language. Schmidt (1990) proposed the Noticing Hypothesis according to which the emergence of new forms should be preceded by their being noticed in the input. Schmidt and Frota (1986, quoted in Thornbury, 1997: 326) suggested that two kinds of noticing are necessary conditions for acquisition:

1. Learners must attend to linguistic features of the input that they are exposed to, without which input cannot become 'intake'.

2. Learners must 'notice the gap', i.e. make comparisons between the current state of their developing linguistic system, as realized in their output, and the target language system, available as input.

The teacher by focussing the learners' attention on the target language and by having them compare this input with the present state of their interlanguage can facilitate the process of acquisition. In fact, research by Fordyce (2014) has shown that explicit instruction using a 'noticing' approach had a positive effect on students' acquisition of epistemic stance. Fordyce investigated the immediate and long-term effect of explicit and implicit instruction of epistemic stance on learners of English at a Japanese university and discovered that, 'it is possible for noticing to lead to long-term retention of target forms, and that instruction that aims to get learners to notice forms is more effective than meaning-focused instruction' (Fordyce, 2014: 22). Fordyce's aim was to draw learners' attention to the forms of epistemic stance and to do this he used a variety of activities. As Scott Thornbury (1997: 327) suggested, 'tasks that provide opportunities for noticing are ones that, even if essentially meaning-focussed, allow the learner to devote some attentional resources to form, and, moreover, provide both the data and the incentive for the learner to make comparisons between interlanguage output and target language models'.

In this case, a learner corpus consisting of argumentative essays from my study could be used to help the learners 'notice' the use of personal pronouns in this genre. Although it would not be discipline-specific as the materials are designed for a general EAP writing class, there would be potential to compare their use in different genres and disciplines.

In the initial stage the students would be given an extract from the learner corpus, which was rich in examples of personal pronouns. It is important to give them a text rather than a list of discrete examples provided by a concordance programme as there is a context to the forms they are examining. For example, the following extract from my corpus is rich in examples of personal pronouns:

I actually work a part-time job. I make a time table and write my schedule to cope with both school and a part-time work. Because of this, I am not a procrastinator anymore. I have got to be able to get my homework done following schedule, which make me good at managing time. When I know that I have to work all day long, I wake up earlier and get things done by the time I go to work. Therefore, my college life goes smooth and I really like it (Aya, Essay 1).

The students would be instructed to highlight the examples of personal pronouns in the above text followed by a discussion about their use. During this discussion the teacher could ask what the students thought about the use of personal pronouns in academic writing. The teacher could then discuss the genre and the differences between an essay and a research paper. In the above extract from an essay the writer has used a number of personal examples to support her position whereas in a research paper the writer would more likely reference primary research. An extract from a research paper could then be provided so that the students could compare the use of personal pronouns in an essay versus a research study. The students would again highlight the personal pronouns and discuss the differences between their use in the essay and research study. This process of 'noticing' and 'comparing' would hopefully facilitate the intake of the language features and help the learners to recognize how and when they should use personal pronouns in their own writing.

The extract above could also be used to highlight the different functions that personal pronouns have and initiate a metalanguage for the students to discuss them. In the example from Aya, she uses them to elaborate an argument but in a research paper they might be used to state a purpose and explain a procedure. This italicized metalanguage could be used to compare their use in different genres of academic writing and help the learners to understand both their form and function.

In the above example from the argumentative essay, Aya used personal examples to support her position and by doing so could be said to have 'overused' them. The teacher could use this extract to illustrate that, although personal examples are valid in this genre, it is better to use a variety of examples, for example, a reference from a secondary source to support the position. It could also be instructive to use an example of 'underuse'. For example:

First, students can do their academic tasks efficiently with doing a part-time job because they learn to manage their time well. Usually, people get work done more efficiently when they are busy and under certain pressure because they know that they have to do the work quickly to do other tasks. Students' schedule gets busier with part-time jobs because they have to sacrifice their free time after school, but because they get busy, they plan ahead and can do their tasks faster. For example, when a student knows that they have a part-time job on Monday night and the deadline of an assignment in on Tuesday, they realize that they have to finish the assignment on a weekend at the latest. Since the student know when they are available and when is not to do the assignment, they plan ahead and try to finish it earlier (Yoko, Essay 1).

In this case, the teacher could draw the learners' attention to the fact that no personal pronouns were used but ask them to highlight the subjects of the sentences. This could lead to a discussion where the students could then compare this paragraph with the previous one by Aya, which was rich in examples. The teacher could ask the students which they considered to be more 'academic' and why. It might be that students believe Yoko's paragraph to be more 'academic' as it is impersonal but this could further the discussion about the use of personal pronouns. Does academic writing in this genre have to be completely impersonal? What is the student's impression of Yoko's writing? (In fact, this is a good example because this student was actually writing from personal experience but because she did not want to use personal pronouns chose to hide her identity).

Conclusion

Gilquin et al., (2007) called learner corpora 'the missing link in EAP pedagogy' and they wrote that:

What L2 learners need is EAP resource books addressing the specific problems they encounter as non-native writers. By showing in context the types of errors learners make, as well as the items they tend to underuse or overuse, learner corpora make such an approach possible (Gilquin et al., 2007: 324).

I agree with them that learner corpora are an important pedagogical tool but I do not believe we should wait for textbooks to be written. Individual teachers can compile corpora based on strict design criteria that can be used to represent the wide range of variables that affect learner language, both learner variables (mother tongue background, proficiency levels, etc.) and task variables (genre, topic, etc.) in a particular class (Granger, 2002). A textbook is a general guide which does not always relate specifically to the needs of every group of learners that a teacher will be aware of. Therefore by using learner corpora and a consciousness-raising approach like 'noticing' we can make students aware of the use and function of personal pronouns in academic writing and how they can be used to shape our identities as writers.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1.
Self-mentions are defined by Hyland (2005: 181) as 'the use of first person pronouns and possessive adjectives to present propositional, affective, and interpersonal information'.

2.
My corpus includes argumentative essays but Ädel's does not. Ädel (2006) obtained the essays by British and American students from the International Corpus of English and therefore did not have specific information about the tasks that were set.

3.
Here and elsewhere IV refers to the interviewer and IE to the interviewee.

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The Use of Personal Pronouns in Academic Writing Pdf

Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0033688217730139

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