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

Figure 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:
IV³ Right. 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.

IE ‘I’?

IV Yes, because you used ‘I’ a lot.

IE Yes.

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 was told by her previous writing teacher 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, used ‘I’ in her writing.

In my corpus, 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 Figure 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 it was not uniform as Figure 5 represents:

	Never	Not in research papers	Try not to	Raw number used in corpus
Shota		✔		16
Yoko	✔			0
Sakura		✔		0
Yusuke			✔	5
Naseong	✔			48
Yasuaki	✔			23
Yuki			✔	2
Kana		✔		1
Ichigo			✔	7
Ran	✔			0