Abstract
This study aims to examine the role of age, proficiency, gender, and style in determining Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition and use of pronouns. Data collected for the purpose of the study were taken from a series of experiments conducted to elicit both child as well as adult (both high and low levels of proficiency) Chinese EFL learners’ use of English pronouns. Twenty 5-9 year-old children (10 males and 10 females) at an all-English daycare center and 40 college students (20 males and 20 females half of each sex are of high proficiency and half are of low proficiency) participated in three oral tasks, namely, question and answer, picture description, and story telling. Results suggested that all those extra-linguistic factors to some extent did affect learners’ pronominal use. First, we found that the learners of different ages were apt to use different strategies to decrease the use of pronouns. Besides, high proficiency learners generally outperformed their low proficiency counterparts in all aspects of pronominal use. Considering the gender difference, owing to their varying degrees of considerateness in conversation, it was found that the female learners used fewer pronouns than the males did. Moreover, the female learners also committed fewer pronominal errors as they have long been deemed as better and quicker language learners (Boyle, 1987; Ekstrand, 1980; Farhady, 1982; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991). As for the style difference, results showed that the learners produced fewer pronominal errors and had lower percentage of pronominal use in tasks that required more attention. It is hoped that the results of this study can reveal some pedagogical implications for EFL teachers while teaching the English pronominal system to different age/gender and various proficiency-level learners.