Investigating Pronouns: The Use of “we” in Secondary School Students’ Essay writing

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to analyze the linguistic constituent; pronoun, “we” as stated in the essays written by third year secondary students of Arab Republic of Egypt in two Secondary schools. As the study under investigation depends so much on a corpus and descriptive analysis, it explores the L2 output of learners in their writing of essay compositions context. It provides examples of pronouns employed by the students. This particular study was aimed at investigating pronouns’ frequencies, the singular Pronouns, and the Plural S Pronouns of the written texts, highlighting the students’ understanding of making use of this linguistic constituent when they write. A corpus-based learner utilized a corpus investigation that has tagging and a frequency of part of speech (POS) of examination employing a software known as concordance will be the scheme of analysis. The results depicted an over-use of the 1st person plural as a subjective personal pronoun (we). The analysis discussion of the pedagogical contribution will be introduced.