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Abstract

Personal metadiscourse makes direct reference to the writer or reader of current text by means of pronouns and nouns. The pronominal forms act as visibility markers in the text and/or an attempt to evoke reader's involvement in textual interaction. This research aims to paint a comprehensive picture of the patterns of personal metadiscourse used in written texts by Pakistani learners and native speakers of English. The data used for this research consists of argumentative essays written by Pakistani advanced learners of English and compared with the essays written by British and American university students. The data has been taken from the International Corpus of Learner English. The data was analyzed to get the frequency of personal metadiscoruse across the corpora. The concordance lines of personal pronouns were also studied to analyze the functions of personal metadiscoruse in Pakistani corpus. The results of the study reveal considerable difference across these corpora. Pakistani learners use more than twice as much personal metadiscourse as the American university students, in turn the American university students' use twice as much personal metadiscourse as British university students. The analysis of this research shows that British students' texts are fact-oriented, Pakistani learner's texts are more expressive and explicit. On the other hand, the AmE learners are more concerned with their imagined reader.