engleski

Writers Visibility in L1 vs. L2 Argumentative Writing: use of personal pronouns in Croatian

Developing different language skills in a foreign language includes acquiring linguistic features, register and style related with a particular skill. For example, the studies from 1980’s (Chafe 1982, Danielewicz 1987) showed that the difference between speech and writing is reflected in a notion of ‘interaction with audience’, i.e. speakers interact with audience directly, while the writers do not. The involvement of author in the text, or writer visibility, is characterized by first and second person reference, speaker’s mental processes, monitoring of information flow, emphatic particles, etc. (Petch-Tyson 1998: 111). Later studies proved that the writer visibility depends on the discourse type and cultural conventions (Petch-Tyson 1998, Zolotova 2014). Zolotova (2014) discuss the overuse and underuse of first and second person reference in English L1 and L2 writing. She proved the tendency of overuse of the ‘we perspective’ and the underuse of ‘I perspective’ in L2 writing by learners of English with Slavic background. This paper investigates writers visibility in Croatian L1 and L2 writing. The main research question is how Croatian L1 and L2 writers differ in the use of I perspective vs. we perspective. For the purpose of this paper argumentative essays in Croatian as L1 and L2 (N=80) will be analysed. The quantitative analysis will be conducted using WordSmith tool. The results will be discussed and the implications for teaching writing in Croatian L2 will be given.

writers visibility, Croatian as L2, personal pronouns

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