A Corpus-based Study Of Personal Reference In Chinese EFL Learners' Letter Writing

As one type of cohesive devices, personal reference plays an important role in textual cohesion. With the publication of Halliday and Hasan' Cohesion in English (1976) , many researches have been done on cohesive devices. This thesis tries to study the cohesive function of personal references in English letters on the basis of Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory.Based on cohesion theory, corpus linguistics, and interlanguage theory, this thesis studies the characteristics of personal references used in letters written by Chinese EFL learners from CLEC. The statistics show that Chinese EFL learners use first and second person pronouns abundantly in letters, whereas native speakers also apply third personal references in addition to their first frequent use of first and second person pronouns. The frequent occurrence of first and second person pronouns is in consistency with the conversational feature of letters. However, the study shows that Chinese EFL learners, especially senior high school students use more first and second person pronouns than native speakers do. The reasons for this are manifold. Influencing factors include the low language proficiency of senior high school students in using various sentence structures and the influence of Chinese mother tongue. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976) , first and second person pronouns are endophoric in special contexts such as letters, and they are cohesive, but third person is inherently cohesive. The statistics reveal that native-speakers use more third person pronouns than Chinese EFL learners do, and consequently, letters written by native-speaker learners' are more coherent than those written by Chinese EFL learners. These findings give us significant implication in helping Chinese EFL learners improve their letter writing skills by using cohesive devices properly.