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Abstract It is of great importance to understand the mechanism of language production by exploring the misuse of personal pronouns in English. Related empirical studies are rare in China although Chinese EFL learners are commonly found to misuse he/she in oral performance. Based on the Triangulation Model (triangulated testing with transcribed recording data, scores of students' performance, questionnaires and interviews), this paper attempts to address the following questions: (1) What constitutes the main reason of Chinese college students' misuse of he/she? (2) Will attention help reduce the misuse of he/she? What is the underlying cognitive motivation for its effective or ineffective reduction in he/she misuse?
The questionnaire-based survey shows that up to 70% of the focus Chinese college students (with a beginning to intermediate English proficiency) consider lack of attention as the major cause of he/she misuse, especially in the case of the feminine pronoun she.
Our inter-group comparison suggests that the misuse of he/she in oral English is highly related to the gender of personal pronouns, where the feminine pronoun she is much more frequently misused than the masculine pronoun he, but as against the attention circumstance, the production of such misuse is insensitive to genders. Furthermore, under both circumstances the frequency of self-repair of he/she misuse would not be significantly influenced by genders.
The intra-group comparison indicates that: attention exerts a significant impact on the misuse of he/she, which is demonstrated in the significant effect of attention on both the production of she errors and the frequency of its self-repair|however, no such effect can be found with he errors. Our integrated analysis of subjective questionnaires and objective performance of students has confirmed that attention plays a significantly positive role in avoiding he/she misuse, which can be seen from the lowering of she errors and the increase of its self-repair. Thus, increasing attention is particularly helpful for Chinese EFL learners (with a beginning to intermediate English proficiency) to refrain from the misuse of he/she. According to the theory of self-monitoring, the cognitive motivation underlying our results lies in the fact that, attention as conscious and selective self-monitoring bear such multiple functions as alerting, orienting and detecting|for possible he/she misuse and particularly the misuse of feminine pronoun she. Therefore, English learners in the state of concentrating attention may develop forecast-type cognitive awareness, make preferable arrangement of cognitive resources, conduct emphatic cognitive detection, and finally effectively lower the production of he/she misuse. Pedagogical implications of this research can be found in the necessity of strengthening the noticing of attention in oral English teaching to help junior Chinese EFL learners effectively avoid he/she misuse, especially the errors of the feminine pronoun she.
It should be noted that our research only focuses on Chinese EFL learners with a beginning to intermediate English proficiency and the misuse of he/she. Further research is expected to target Chinese EFL learners at different levels of English proficiency|hence a comprehensive investigation of the misuse of third person pronouns could be carried out.
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2014, Vol. 44 
