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

Figure 5 : Students previous teaching in the use of personal pronouns
Figure 5 shows the results of the preliminary interviews when I asked the students about what instruction they had received in regards to personal pronouns. It shows that ten of the participants had received instruction that discouraged their use but that seven in fact had used them in the corpus. Moreover, as the other three students did not use one 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 How about the using I?

IE I.

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…

IE Yeah.

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!].

IV [Unclear].

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 its more, subject…

IV Subjective.

IE Subjective… I thought its kind of more strong example.

IV Okay if you used I.

IE Yeah.

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?

IV I know what you mean.

She 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 and we need to find ways to help them to see how this important feature of writing can be used to foster, not hinder, their identity as an academic writer.