| There has been insightful research into the discourse phenomenon of personal reference from the perspective of stylistic analysis, cognitive development, contrastive study and language acquisition. In terms of Chinese, prior studies mainly focus on the Chinese reference system and the comparison with other languages. The construction of Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Granger et al 1995) provides a new opportunity of investigating how Chinese EFL learners approach personal reference in comparison with native English speakers and learners from other L1 backgrounds in the same narrative context. The present study is based on the theories of Variation Analysis (Schiffrin 1994) and Reference Movement (Klein and von Stutterheim 1987). Reference is analyzed into three referential statuses: reference introduction, reference maintenance and reference shift. Referential strategy is studied through the frequency and distribution of linguistic forms for reference of same referential status. The research questions are:1) What are the characteristics of referential strategies used by Chinese EFL learners in comparison with native speakers of English?2) Are these characteristics universal or Chinese-specific?3) Is there any correlation between referential strategies and language proficiency of EFL learners?The study is a contrastive interlanguage analysis (Granger 1998) based on mini homogeneous corpus. In accordance with the research questions, there are three parts of comparison: Chinese EFL learners vs. native English speakers; Chinese EFL learners vs. French and Japanese EFL learners; high-scoring Chinese EFL learners vs. low-scoring Chinese EFL learners. The study first of all involves the collection of five types of homogeneous data: narratives of the same set of pictures by Chinese, Frenchand Japanese EFL learners as well as native English speakers extracted from LINDSEI, and relevant Mandarin samples collected by the author (altogether 34,244 words). The POStagger CLAWS (see Leech et al 1994) and the lexical analysis tools WordSmith (Scott 1996) are combined with manual classification in data coding and processing. Frequency and distribution of different grammatical forms are analyzed to show how reference is realized through different strategies.The findings of the present study first of all show a context-specific referential pattern in native speakers' narratives, which disagrees with the referential conventions discussed in earlier studies (Bamberg 1997; Clancy 1980; Nistov 2001; Verhoeven and Stromqvist 2001). In this particular context with two protagonists who are different in gender, pronouns are used extensively for reference shift (84.18%) as well as maintenance (89.71%), while nominal phrases are reserved for reference introduction, episode boundaries and special connotations. Secondly, there are profound differences between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers in their referential strategies. The overuse of nominal strategy characterizes Chinese learners. The nominal tendency is most prominent in reference shift (81.82%) , reference following direct speech (reference maintenance=63.16%; reference shift=93.75%) and in the beginning part of the narrative. Besides, the English third person singular pronouns are error-prone. Pronominal reference for a female character is the hardest nut. Analysis of French and Japanese data indicates that the abovementioned features are mainly confined to Chinese EFL learners. They are likely to be associated with L1 transfer resulting from the Chinese reference conventions and the identical phonetic features of Chinese third person singular pronouns. The overuse of nominal strategy may be a direct result of the influence of the Chinese referential strategies and an indirect result of a communicative strategy to avoid making pronoun errors. Finally, comparison between the high-scoring and low-scoring Chinese EFL learners suggests that high-scoring learners use pronominal strategy for reference maintena...
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