Third Person Point of View in EFL Academic Writing: Ventriloquizing

This study examines the use of author self-reference, but pronouns, in the form of third person point of view in academic writing. The data for analysis were retrieved from C-SMILE (Corpus of State University of Malang Indonesian Learners’ English), which consisted of 124 theses and 138 research articles of EFL learners, who were undergraduate students of the Department of English, State University of Malang. Results demonstrated abundant uses of the researcher as author self-reference. This leads to the possibility to expand the notion of ventriloquizing drawn on spoken discourse for application into written discourse. We hypothetically believe that ventriloquizing, which occurs in academic writing, has a strong relation with self-effacing device as a strategy to disguise authors’ identity. We conclude that the authors’ (EFL learners’) choice of the researcher as referent is highly affected by the “ventriloquizing-like” strategy in their L1 and L2 although they are different in terms of purposes.