Expressing Standpoints in EFL Written Discourse

As an aid to the development of instruction in good writing style for advanced learners of English as a second language, three signals of writer visibility in texts are investigated in data from a subset of the International Corpus of Learner English, an untagged computer collection of essays of fixed length on predetermined topics written in English by advanced university students; the subcorpora under study are written by native speakers of Czech, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, & English (N unspecified). Frequencies of first person singular, first person plural, & second person pronouns are compared across the subcorpora, as are frequencies of verbs following I. Results indicate substantial overuse of the personal pronouns in all English learner subcorpora, ranging from 200% of native speaker usage for Dutch speakers to 400% for Czech speakers. It is suggested that native speakers may differ from learners in using passives, present participles, & other strategies that avoid personal pronouns. References. J. Hitchcock