An Empirical Study Of The Misuses Of English Pronouns Among Higher Vocational School Students

Pronoun is a very important part of speech in English and exerts a great influence in three aspects which are the expression of communication, the demonstration of interpersonal meaning and the cohesion of text. In recent years, the study of English pronoun develops fast. The scholars and researchers at home and abroad have done a great deal of work of English pronoun from different aspects of English teaching and learning, including the acquisition of English pronouns and the pronoun misuses (Ellis1994, Wang Liqing2006, Jia Tingting2007etc.) But there are just few studies of misuses of English pronoun by higher vocational school students. Apparently, the pronoun misuses have become a serious problem which arouses the more and more English learners and teachers greater interest in it.Even though, the study of pronouns develops fast, there are still fewer researches done to study the pronoun misuses among vocational college school students. So according to the previous researches and the guidance of the error analysis theory and transfer theory, the writer studied English pronoun misuses among higher vocational school students in their essay writing and explored the causes of misuses in order to have a better understanding of students’ use of English pronouns and offer some suggestions to the further teaching.The present paper focuses on five issues:(1) what’s the distribution of misuses of pronouns and which category of pronouns is more likely to be misused?(2) What are the types of errors that can be diagnosed from the pronoun misuses?(3) What are the causes of misuses of pronouns?(4) What are the negative effects of misuses of pronouns?(5) What measures can be taken to help avoid making errors?This thesis aims at exploring the empirical study the misuses of English of pronoun among320higher vocational school students in their essay writing. The misuses of pronoun in the essays of students has been quantitatively and qualitatively investigated and analyzed. What’s more, all the data will be analyzed by the Excel further confirming the negative effects of English pronoun misuses.The detailed study of compositions and questionnaire of students, the author reached the conclusions:(1) The misuses of pronoun is focused on five categories which are separately personal pronoun, possessive pronoun, reflective pronoun, demonstrative pronoun and relative pronoun among nine categories. The personal pronoun is most wrongly used which accounts for22%.(2) According to the analysis of students’ compositions, seven types of errors were found:number confusion, personal confusion, case confusion, vague reference, pronoun shift, gender confusion and others.The present paper analyzes the effects of English pronoun misuses from three aspects, namely, ideational meta-function, interpersonal meta-function and textual meta-function and points out the English pronoun misuses will have a negative effect on the whole text. According to the statistic and analysis, the author finds that the correlation coefficient between the frequency of pronoun misuse and students’ writing score is-0.82, confirming further the negative effects English pronoun misuses to the whole passage. The author explores the causes of pronoun misuses based on the results of questionnaire and demonstrates the factors of the transfer of mother tongue.In addition, this essay also works out some pedagogical implications for EFL learning and teaching in China. It calls attention to the teaching of basic grammar in college. At the same time, teachers should cultivate students’ abilities to think in English. In the process of teaching, teachers should apply comparative analysis to raise students’ awareness and knowledge of language differences, and students themselves should pay great attention to the problem of wrongly used pronouns and gradually reduce errors. Teachers are also advised to treat students’ errors properly. Because some errors will be prone to diminish, or even disappear with advanced study of students, so teachers should not be too serious about such kind of errors.