The Gender Mixed Use Errors Of The Third Person Animate Singular English Pronouns By Chinese EFL Learners In Their Oral Production

The present research aims to investigate the gender mixed use of the third person animate singular pronouns by Chinese EFL learners in their oral English production. The gender mixed use errors of the pronouns in this paper are defined as the misuse in gender. Altogether there are eight error types: HE (the misuse of "she" when "he" should be used), SHE (the misuse of "he" when "she" should be used) and the other corresponding forms HIM (the misuse of the accusative "her"), HERA (the misuse of "him") HIS (the misuse of the possessive "her"), HERP (the misuse of "his"), HIMSELF (the misuse of "herself), HERSELF (the misuse of "himself). Three studies were conducted in the present research: a corpus survey, an interpreting study and a working memory test.In the corpus survey we calculated the frequency and error rates for the above eight types of gender errors, based on the data in SECCL (Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners). The comparisons of the error rates show that Chinese EFL learners tended to use the male pronouns when the female pronouns should have been used. Moreover, there were more gender misuse errors in the nominative and the possessive pronouns than in the accusative and the reflexive pronouns.In the interpreting study, we asked the subjects to do consecutive interpreting from Chinese to English. Then we also calculated the error rates for the eight error types in their production. The results from the corpus study were further confirmed in this study. Apart from that, we found that the subjects made more gender misuse errors in the easy texts than in the difficult ones, especially in the easy texts with only one character (either a male or a female). In the working memory test we gained the working memory span scores for each subject. Then we matched the scores with the error rates we got in the interpreting task. A correlation study was conducted and we found that there was no significant correlation between the working memory capacity and the error rates of the gender misuses.To sum up, this paper tries to describe a general picture of the gender misuse patterns for the third person animate singular pronouns and to explore the possible underlying factors. We may conclude that this type of errors presents a serious problem for Chinese EFL learners and it is possible that Chinese EFL learners do not pay enough attention to the gender information in an antecedent when they try to encode the antecedent with a pronoun.