Pronoun Use in EFL Writing: A Case Study of Preservice English Teachers

This study is an exploratory investigation of preservice English teachers’ writing in terms of the patterns of pronouns use in their English composition. The corpus data from two differing groups (25 undergraduate students and 15 graduate students) were analyzed using WordSmith Tools focusing on frequency of pronoun types, 3rd person NPs versus 3rd person reference ratio, and pronoun density defined by frequency and percentage of each pronoun use. The study shows that the total occurrences of pronouns are dominantly higher in the undergraduate group than in the graduate counterpart, while the use of 1st person singular pronoun reveals the highest frequency among all types of pronouns in this population. Students’ use of 3rd person pronouns is noticeably higher in the undergraduate, not in the graduate writing. Density of pronouns by the percentage of pronoun occurrence is also higher in the undergraduate writing. These findings suggest while the higher ratio of content words in graduate writing (particularly 3rd person NPs) may indicate a higher lexical density as the text has numerous content words, the undergraduate essays are the case where the text is lexically less dense and more repetitive in its structure. Implications for ELT writing instruction are discussed.