Person Markers in Non-Native Students’ Writing

Abstract

The present paper seeks to analyse person markers, which refer to “the use of first person pronouns and possessive adjectives” (Hyland 2014(1999), p. 104), in university learner English. Students are constantly encouraged to aim at academic register, one of the features of which is an attempt at objectivity. While this could be achieved by using an impersonal style, “writers gain credibility by projecting an identity invested with individual authority, displaying confidence in their evaluations and commitment to their ideas” (Hyland 2002, p. 1091). Writers, therefore, have to find the right level of balance between invisibility and visibility in their work. Person markers, as one of the most important linguistic means to create authorial presence (Burneikaitė 2013), being subjected to genre constraints, pose numerous problems to non-native students who have repeatedly been characterised as lacking in awareness of genre conventions and having problems with formal register (Breeze 2007). Though the topic of authorial stance has been researched widely, there has been little analysis of Lithuanian learners’ English data (cf. Burneikaitė 2008, 2013). In addition, no research has been found that analysed genre or institution variables in the use of person markers in Lithuanian undergraduates’ writing. This shows a need for the present study, which focuses on genre, language proficiency, institutional, and L1 variables. The data for the study was retrieved from a number of corpora representing non-native (Lithuanian) and native (English) university students’ language. The results indicate different roles of the variables in the explicit expression of authorial stance by person markers.

Writer visibility in L1 vs. L2 argumentative writing: Use of the first person personal pronouns in Croatian

“…On the other hand, reports were "perceived as a type of collective task involving others" (Breeze 2007: 20), which can be observed through more frequent usage of we, than in the essays. In the study by Bikelienė (2016) the participants showed equal use of singular person markers in argumentative essays and research papers. In contrast, in order to show explicit writer presence in the text of proposals, NNS were using mostly plural markers.…”

“…Th ere are several possible explanations of the results of the present study. To some extent the results might be related to the text genre (Bikelienė 2016;Rodríguez, Vázquez and Guzmán 2011;Zolotova 2014). Argumentative essays should present diff erent points of view, providing the author's opinion with supporting arguments, which was clearly stated in the writing instruction.…”

“…Th e representation of writer in a text is commonly referred to as discoursal identity (Ivanic 1998), authorial identity (Hyland 2002) or writer/reader visibility (Zolotova 2014). Diff erent studies examined W/R visibility from various perspectives: native vs. non-native (Bikelienė 2016;Paquot, Hasselgård and Ebeling 2013;Rodríguez, Vázquez and Guzmán 2011;Zolotova 2014), academic genre vs. argumentative genre (Bikelienė 2016;Rodríguez, Vázquez and Guzmán 2011;Zolotova 2014), language profi ciency (Bikelienė 2016;Breeze 2007;Chang 2015), cultural diff erences (Ädel 2001;Luan and Zhang 2016;Paquot, Hasselgård andEbeling 2013) etc. Hyland (2002) argues that the expression of W/R identity is determined by the culture of a (professional) community to which the text belongs, and the home culture of the author.…”

“…Nevertheless, nativeness is not the only isolated factor that infl uences the expression of W/R visibility in a text. Th e study on W/R visibility in English texts written by non-native (Lithuanian) and native (English) university students (Bikelienė 2016) took into consideration genre, language profi ciency, institutional, and L1 variables. Th e results suggested that W/R visibility is in close relation with language profi ciency, i.e.…”