I, YOU, AND WE IN SERBIAN EFL ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING FROM THE ESSAY TITLE PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Frequent personal pronoun use, mainly treated as involvement feature overuse, is a commonplace in EFL argumentative writing. This article explores whether the first and second person pronoun use in the Serbian component of ICLE v3 may have been prompted by the essay title factor. Therefore the selected essay titles were assessed according to the two criteria: the presence/absence of first and second person pronouns, and their different uses as regards personal involvement, i.e. personal (specific), or generic (non-referential) uses. The results of the analysis show that the pronoun use has been enhanced by the essay titles at least up to some extent. Moreover, student writers used the pronouns in their personal meanings more readily if such a model was offered in the essay title. The implication is that student writers should not only be advised to avoid personal pronoun use in EFL writing; they should be supported in becoming aware of the options of expressing their identity, which will lead to adapting their linguistic choices to genre requirements more successfully.