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Article published In: Applied Pragmatics
Vol. 7:1 (2025) ► pp.1–28

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Frequency and listener perceptions of the nursery we in instructor-student interactions

ORCiD logo with link | University of South Florida
Published online: 5 August 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ap.00027.han
Abstract
Teachers are often cited as using the nursery we, in which the pronoun we functions as a second-person pronoun (e.g., “We read about this last week”; De Cock, B. (2011). Why we can be you: The use of 1st person plural forms with hearer reference in English and Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(11), 2762–2775. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). However, there is little consensus about how listeners perceive its use. An empirical investigation of the nursery we can help determine whether the instructor use of this pronoun strengthens or weakens rapport, an integral aspect of classroom learning. The present study examines frequency and listener perceptions of the nursery we through a mixed-methods approach. A corpus analysis of office hour visits documented in the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language (T2K-SWAL) corpus (Biber, D., Conrad, S., Reppen, R., Byrd, P., Helt, M., Clark, V., Cortes, V., Csomay, E., & Urzua, A. (2004). Representing language use in the university: Analysis of the TOEFFL 2000 spoken and written academic language corpus. Test of English as a Foreign Language.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) reveals the nursery we is frequent in instructors’ speech but rarely used by students. Survey results demonstrate that students perceive the instructor use of the nursery we to be more likable, helpful, encouraging, and coaxing than the the use of you, and there is a negligible effect between how students perceive the nursery we compared to you in terms of being sarcastic or condescending. Focus group comments suggest the nursery we establishes solidarity between instructors and students, which can strengthen rapport. These findings support the instructor use of the nursery we as a rapport-building technique when interacting with students.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Teacher talk and rapport
    • 2.2Non-prototypical functions of the pronoun we
    • 2.3Use and perceptions of the nursery we
    • 2.4The present study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Corpus analysis
    • 3.2Survey and focus group interview
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Frequency
    • 4.2Student perceptions from survey and focus group data
  • 5.Conclusion
    • 5.1Pedagogical implications
    • 5.2Future directions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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