Personal Pronoun Use in Community-College Student Writing: Developing an Academic Self Olga D. Lambert Benedictine University Lisle, IL, USA WRAB III: Paris 2014 Personal Pronoun Use in Speech and Writing Frequent use of personal pronouns is an important feature of spoken discourse (Biber, 1988). In contrast, personal pronouns are rarely used in academic prose. In written discourse, personal pronoun use is perceived by readers as a marker of a less formal tone and a closer reader-writer distance (Thayer et al., 2010). Corpus-Based Studies of Personal Pronoun Use in Academic Writing Most studies done on corpora of high-level academic writing Hyland (2001): 240 published articles in 8 disciplines Hyland (2002): 64 Hong Kong undergraduate theses by L2 writers Harwood (2005): Qualitative analysis of 40 articles across 4 disciplines First Person Pronoun Use in Academic Writing: Author's Presence and Competence Hyland (2001) and Harwood (2005) found that authors of published academic articles use first person pronouns to establish credibility and membership in a disciplinary community. In 2002, Hyland found that L2 undergraduate thesis writers underuse first person pronouns compared to the authors of the published articles in the 2001 study. Personal Pronouns in Student Writing: A Gap in the Literature Novice academic writers need to: Negotiate the spoken-written discourse continuum Establish an appropriate academic self Breeze (2007) examined a small sample of undergraduate student essays and reports Overuse of I and you in essays Use of we in reports shows awareness of different academic genres and audiences More corpus-based studies of novice academic writing are needed The Present Study: Research Questions Does novice academic writers' use of first and second person pronouns mirror spoken discourse or the conventions of academic prose? Are there differences in the use of first and second person pronouns? In the use of singular (I, me, my) and plural (we, our) first person pronouns? Have the patterns of personal pronoun use in student writing changed over time? Corpus and Method Summaries and reviews of “Into the Electronic Millenium,” a chapter of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies, written by first-semester community college students between 1999 and 2013: the Gutenberg Elegies Corpus (GEC) Roughly 140,000 words The frequencies of I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours, you, your, and yours calculated in 19992000, 2003-2005, and 2012-2013 samples and standardized to occurrences/1,000 words (see Biber, 1988) Working Hypotheses Students' use of personal pronouns will be closer to spoken language than to academic writing Students' use of I will increase over time while the use of we will decrease (a shift to greater orality) “My sense is that there's a generational difference. I think the younger folk coming in now are more inclined to use the passive voice and I than they are to use we” (quoted in Harwood, 2006, p. 443) Personal Pronoun Use: A Comparison of Biber's Data and the GEC 70 60 57.9 50 40 30.84 30 29.4 23.15 20 10 5.7 0 Biber AP Biber F-to-F 2003-2005 1999-2000 2012-2013 First Person Pronouns: I, me, my,mine, we, us, our, ours Second Person Pronouns: you, your, yours First Person Pronouns in the GEC: Singular vs. Plural 25 20.81 19.04 20 Singular 10 Plural 14.38 15 10.36 10.03 8.77 5 0 1999-2000 2003-2005 2012-2013 References Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge NY: Cambridge University Press. Breeze, R. (2007). How personal is this text? Researching writer and reader presence in student writing using WordSmith tools. CORELL: Computer Resources for Language Learning, 1, 14-21. Harwood, N. (2005). “Nowhere has anyone attempted . . . In this article I do just that”: A corpus-based study of self-promotional I and we in academic writing across four disciplines. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1027-1031. Harwood, N. (2006). (In)appropriate personal pronoun use in political science. A qualitative study and a proposed heuristic for future research. Written Communication, 23(4), 424-450. Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 20, 207-226. Hyland, K. (2002). Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of 1091-1112. Pragmatics, 34, Thayer, A., Evans, M.B., McBride, A.A., Queen, M., & Spyridakis, J.H. (2010). I, pronoun: A study of formality in online content. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 40(4), 447-458. Thank you! Olga Lambert olambert@ben.edu