Abstract
ABSTRACT Second language learners are susceptible to making errors in various aspects of their L2 for a variety of reasons. For Mandarin-Chinese learners of English, the relatively intricate pronominal system of English is a prevalent area in which mistakes occur, especially in the area of personal pronouns. One of the most commonly observed and persistent error amongst Mandarin-Chinese EFL learners is mismatching English gender-marked pronouns with the gender of the referent (Felzien, 2011). That is, Mandarin-Chinese EFL learners would frequently produce utterances such as His name is Katie. To connect a pronoun to its antecedent requires the antecedent to be kept in memory; in other words, pronoun resolution demands the operation of working memory (Qiu et al, 2013). Building on existing findings, the present study investigated Mandarin-Chinese EFL learners’ spoken and written productions of English gender pronouns and the role of working memory to provide more insight into the underlying causes of English gender pronoun misuse. A total of 30 high-intermediate Mandarin-Chinese EFL learners were recruited for the present study. They all completed three tasks: a reading-span test to evaluate their working memory capacities; a speaking task and a writing task, both of which involved the introduction of a foreign student or a character from an American sitcom. The learners’ use of English gender pronouns was analyzed and compared between the speaking and writing tasks. Since the learners’ gender pronoun error rate of the writing task was close to zero, only their gender pronoun error rate in speech was analyzed with their working memory test scores to see whether there is a correlation between their working memory capacities and accuracy of gender pronoun production. The results show that the Mandarin-Chinese EFL learners made more gender pronoun errors in speech than in writing. A plausible reason could be that speech is more time-constrained than writing, and thus learners’ L1 automatic procedure is harder to shut off and may compete for access with the learners’ L2 procedure for production. We also found that the male gender pronoun was more often misused for the female gender pronoun than the other way around. One possible explanation of this finding is that although Mandarin-Chinese does not indicate gender in the spoken form of pronouns, the written form of male gender pronoun 他 can act as a default representing both male and female pronouns. However, no correlation was found between Mandarin-Chinese EFL learners’ English gender pronoun error rate and their working memory capacities. It may be because all the learners from our study have fully acquired the knowledge of English gender pronouns, and thus their working memory capacity did not influence their accuracy of gender pronoun production. The present study investigated the roles of language modality and working memory on Mandarin-Chinese EFL learners’ production of English gender pronouns. By looking at how Mandarin-Chinese EFL learners used gender pronouns in speech and writing, we were able to provide some insights into the underlying cause of EFL learners’ gender pronoun misuse.