A comparative study of advanced learners' voice in academic writing: a case of discussion sections in master's theses

The aim of the study was to investigate the extent to which American-educated writers and Thai EFL writers mention themselves in writing discussion sections of their master’s theses. It sought to identify differences and similarities in their use of self-mentioning devices in academic writing.
Ten American English speakers’ master’s theses (NS) and ten Thai EFL speakers’ master’s theses in the area of applied linguistics written between 2008 and 2011 were randomly selected as the data sources. The corpuses were scanned by computer software for the following self-mentioning devices: 1) personal pronouns I, we, me and us and 2) possessive determiners my and you, and 3) possessive pronouns mine and ours.
The findings showed that in terms of frequency, the writers in the United States used more self-mentioning devices than their Thai counterparts. Despite the presence of self-mentioning devices in the Thai theses, the numbers of types and tokens of these devices are much smaller than those found in the American corpus.