earticle

영어

The purpose of the study is to investigate Korean EFL learners’ use of the first-person singular pronoun “I” in their argumentative essays. There has been a conflict between the perspectives of objectivity and personal preference in academic writing regarding the issues of using this pronoun by EFL learners. Furthermore, they might have great difficulty combining their own opinions with traditional objective styles of academic essays through realizing their identity in an argument situation. To this end, the study analyzes two learner corpora’s: Korean learner corpus(ICLE_Kr) and native learner corpus(LOCNESS) to describe functional patterns of the first person pronoun and its’ collocational networks. The results showed that Korean learners overused “I”, but the patterns of functions are similar to those of native learners. In particular, both groups often use the pronoun in situations of personal matters, but not when expressing opinions. However, there is a clear difference in using their identity. Korean learners have focused on emphasizing their personal opinion when they argue a controversial issue, while native learners tend to use the first person pronoun referring to universal and common property. Based on the findings, the study recommends that EFL learners consciously attend to authentic language such as corpus data to achieve the proper use of the first person pronoun.