The use of personal pronouns in the writing of argumentative essays by efl writers Introduction

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) and were collected from a number of different disciplines and was then compared with a corpus of expert writing from research articles in journals. He 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 undergraduates 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 contain 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, p.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 Figure 1:

Function	Description	Example
Stating a purpose	Signals the writer’s intention and provides structure for the text	In this section, I am going to describe the findings from my interviews…
Explaining a procedure	Describing the research procedures used	I have collected the data of Hang Seng Index, Shanghai A…
Stating results/claims	Explicit presentation of the writer’s knowledge claim	Likewise I have offered evidence that some critical thinking practices may marginalise…
Expressing self-benefits	Expression of what the writers have personally gained	To conclude, this interview is very useful both in completing our final year report and teaching me about how to do business…
Elaborating an argument	Description of the writer’s line of reasoning	I think it works something like this: suppose we start with a new, just-assembled ship S…
Acknowledgements	Recognition of assistance	I hereby offer my deepest gratitude to my mother…