On Gender Misuses Of Third-person Singular Pronouns In Chinese EFL Students' Oral English

Gender misuses of third-person singular pronouns are very common in Chinese EFL learners'oral English. Researchers of SLA have already detected Chinese EFL learners'misuses of "he" invariably for both "he" and "she" and defined them as fossilized phenomena. The usual explanation is that the third-person singular pronouns in oral Chinese do not distinguish between genders. However, some scholars discover that students whose mother tongues differentiate between male pronouns and female pronouns also misuse genders of English third-person singular pronouns. Therefore, the transfer theory is not sufficient to explain the complicated gender misuses and solve the problems for Chinese EFL learners.This thesis explores the influence of the oral English task on gender misuses and communication strategies adopted by students to reduce gender misuses, aiming to answer three questions:(1) What are the characteristics of gender misuses of third-person singular pronouns in Chinese EFL students'oral English?(2) Are gender misuses influenced by different oral English tasks? If yes, in what way?(3) Are students aware of their gender misuses? If yes, what communication strategies have they adopted in reducing misuses?In order to probe into the aforementioned three questions, a corpus-based study supplemented by classroom observation is conducted. The corpus-based study establishes a sub-corpus of gender misuses based on COLSEC. It aims to answer the first question by exploring general misuse types, misuse rates and misuse self-correction rates in the sub-corpus. The classroom observation collects gender misuses from the output of 100 non-English-major college students at the fourth English level from Anhui University in three tasks conducted in 18 periods of oral English classes:picture-narration task, guessing game task and story-telling task. It intends to answer the second and the third research questions by analyzing the influence of the task on the gender misuse characteristics and communication strategies applied by students. Through our study the three questions are answered:(1) Gender misuses of third-person singular pronouns are serious in the output of Chinese EFL learners. Students tend to misuse male pronouns where female pronouns should have been used and they have difficulty in correcting these misuses by themselves.(2) Gender misuses are influenced by the oral English task in terms of the number of the characters, the length of the output that the task demands and the pronouns'adjacent referents. The same task has different influence upon gender misuses of different cases of pronouns.(3) Students are aware of their gender misuses and adopt various communication strategies to reduce misuses, such as formal reduction strategy supplemented by generalization achievement strategy, para-linguistic gesture achievement strategy as well as L1-based code switching achievement strategy as well as propositional functional reduction strategy. Different strategies have different effects on the acquisition of the gender information in third-person singular pronouns and are closely related with the mastery of third-person singular pronouns.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter one introduces the background of the study, the significance of the study, objectives of the study and the organization of the thesis. Chapter two discusses definitions of two related terms "self-correction" and "communication strategies", compares third-person singular pronouns in English and in Mandarin Chinese and makes a systematic survey on related studies on gender misuses of third-person singular pronouns at home and abroad with achievements and limitations of these studies discussed. Chapter three describes the specific research questions, subjects and procedures of the corpus-based study and classroom observation. Chapter four answers the three research questions in detail respectively. Chapter five winds up the whole thesis, pointing out major findings, implications and limitations of the study and suggestions for further research.