First-person pronouns in academic writing: A survey of teachers’ views and practices

This study investigates the extent to which and how academic writing teachers discuss first-person pronouns (e.g., I, me, my) in their classes and explores their views on the pronoun use in student writing. Drawing on survey data from ninety-four academic writing teachers primarily from the Asia-Pacific region, our study shows that a majority (eighty-four of ninety-four; 89.4%) of the teachers reported discussing first-person pronouns in their writing classes. Some teachers indicated that they permitted the use of first-person pronouns when assessment tasks required students to reflect on their experience and when the pronoun use was aligned with disciplinary norms. However, despite there being a rather positive attitude towards the use of first-person pronouns among teachers, some were required by the given marking rubrics to penalize their students for using first-person pronouns, highlighting inconsistencies between teachers’ beliefs and assessment criteria. The main reasons for discouraging the use of first-person pronouns identified in our study were associated with formality, objectivity, assessment, and frequency. Our study also provides practical strategies (e.g., using learner corpora and discipline-specific examples) to support effective teaching of first-person pronouns in academic writing classes.

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .