Abstract
This paper explores the use of pronouns in student academic writing in L1 Norwegian and L2 English. Three aspects of pronoun use are examined: general pronoun frequency, pronoun reference, and the uses of ‘I’ and ‘we’. Students of English are typically advised to avoid being explicitly present in their academic texts (Lysvåg & Stenbrenden 2014), while students writing in Norwegian are often encouraged to use first-person pronouns. However, the results show that both sets of students use explicit self-reference in similar ways. Frequent uses of ‘I’ and ‘we’ are as conductors of research and as guides or navigators assisting the reader through the text.
Highlights
This paper explores the use of pronouns in student academic writing in L1 Norwegian and L2 English
The study is a part of a larger corpus compilation project comprising academic texts written by students attending a master’s program at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences
The insights gained from the study of the material collected for this project will add to those from the relatively few existing studies of student academic writing in Norway that include a contrastive perspective
Summary
This paper explores the use of pronouns in student academic writing in L1 Norwegian and L2 English. This article presents results from a pilot study of pronoun use and reference in L1 Norwegian and L2 English student texts. She finds that ‘I’ as conductor of research and the reflexive ‘I’ are more prominent in the English research articles, while the Spanish articles have more examples of ‘I’ as guide or navigator and ‘I’ as evaluator of previous claims, and concludes that identity is constructed discursively in different ways in English and Spanish This leads us to a question that is of interest for the present study, namely whether writers transfer knowledge of academic writing from their first language to their second language.
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