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

Results and discussion

	Essay 1		Essay 2		Essay 3			All essays
	I	we	I	we		I	we		I	we
Shota	5	2	1	0		0	0		6	2
Aya	34	0	2	1		6	1		42	2
Ran	0	0	0	0		0	0		0	0
Yuka	1	0	1	0		2	0		4	0
Yuki	0	0	2	0		0	0		2	0
Kana	1	0	0	0		0	0		1	0
Ichigo	0	0	5	1		0	0		5	1
Chikasa	25	4	5	0		12	5		42	9
Yoko	0	0	0	0		0	0		0	0
Sakura	0	0	0	0		0	0		0	0
Yasuaki	8	0	0	0		3	0		11	0
Jeemin	0	0	0	0		0	0		0	0
Sawako	2	0	5	0		0	0		7	0
Naseong	19	0	0	0		8	5		27	5
Maki	32	0	3	0		9	1		44	1
Yunina	19	2	4	1		0	0		23	3
Yusuke	4	0	0	0		1	0		5	0
TOTAL	150	8	28	3		41	12		219	23

Figure 3: Total number of personal pronouns used per essay per student
Figure 4: The raw data of the number of personal pronouns (‘I’ and ‘we’) used in the corpus
The raw data in Figure 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.
In terms of expert writing Hyland (2001) has highlighted that there are disciplinary differences when he examined the use of personal pronouns in a variety of disciplines, but these corpora of expert writing are not the same genre as is my corpus. The 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’ (although not argumentative essays as in my corpus²), Ädel (2006) compared three corpora of essays written by university students in Sweden, the U.S and Britain and found that the EFL Swedish students used more first person singular pronouns than their counterparts in the U.S. 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. 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 which comes from the essay on part-time jobs Maki uses her personal experience to provide evidence to support her ideas and there are 13 examples of the first-person pronoun ‘I’, which can be contrasted with the second paragraph, from the essay on illegal drugs, where she used secondary sources to support her argument, and there are no personal pronouns used.

Another factor was the students’ writing experience as the participants who had received more instruction and had more experience of academic writing generally used fewer personal pronouns. In the paragraph below 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…

Her previous teaching causes 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 and in the other two examples they 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 and, 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, 1100-1106) suggested a classification of discourse functions (see Figure 1).There were no examples of (5) expressing self-benefits and (6) acknowledgments 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.
Figure 4 shows the discourse functions of the personal pronouns used in the essays contained in my corpus. It is clear that two functions, stating a result/claim and elaborating an argument, were by far the most used; they made up 97.1% of all the examples used.

Function	Essay 1		Essay 2		Essay 3			Total
	Raw	%	Raw	%		Raw	%		Raw	%
Stating a purpose	1	0.7	4	13		1	1.9		6	2.5
Explaining a procedure	0	0	1	3.2		0	0		1	0.4
Stating results/claims	59	37.3	13	41.9		13	24.5		85	35.1
Expressing self-benefits	0	0	0	0		0	0		0	0
Elaborating an argument	98	62	13	41.9		39	73.6		150	62
Acknowledgements	0	0	0	0		0	0		0	0