Causes of Problems with Pronoun References in English Writing and
Some Corresponding Suggestions
Luo Lili,
Foreign Language School
Zhejiang Wanli Univeristy, P.R.China, 315000
Abstract The training and significance of English writing have long been underestimated, compared
with the training of listening and reading skills. Actually, the teaching of writing has often been
perceived to be synonymous with the teaching of grammar and sentence structure, seldom involving the
whole process of writing, so many students hold the wrong view that their writings are good as long as
there are no grammatical or spelling mistakes. However, any written discourse should exhibit its unity,
coherence and cohesiveness, or it hasn’t texture—the property of “being a text”.
Pronominal references follow different patterns in the essays of the Chinese students, from those
in the essays of the English native speakers, and sometimes result in an incoherent text, to the point of
causing serious misunderstanding.
The author insists that the English teachers should, above all, enhance the students’ awareness of
the importance of the pronoun references and the pronominal cohesion in order to increase the students’
capability of handling the problems with pronoun references in the process of writing. Teachers,
including those of intensive reading and extensive reading, should spare some time teaching writing by
focusing on the discourse level, so that the students will gradually learn to use different cohesive devices
to organize a text. In addition, while they are instructed to write or revise an essay, students should pay
more attention to the overall organization of a discourse, especially the pronominal cohesion discussed
in this thesis, not only to the grammatical and syntactic problems. At the end of the thesis, the author
suggests that the English teachers should combine “the product approach” with “the process approach”
in the process of teaching writing.
Key words pronoun reference
English Writing
suggestions
1. Introduction
1. 1 Writing—a difficult skill to acquire
For many English learners, English writing is often the last and hardest language skill to acquire,
which is no exception for Chinese students. As a result, the writing ability of many learners is often
poorer than other abilities. This is the case not only with Chinese students, but also with native
speakers of English.
Compared with speaking, writing ability is a productive and expressive skill but writing has
higher requirements than speaking. Among other things, any written discourse should exhibit its unity,
coherence and cohesiveness, as Xu Jiaseng (1990:34) ever puts.
Therefore, writing in English is generally considered to be an advanced and demanding skill that
is added to the complexities inherent in trying to master the English language. Moreover, learning to
write well is also a difficult and lengthy process, one that induces anxiety and frustration in many
learners. It is no wonder that writing well seems beyond the power of most Chinese students even after
over 10 years’ learning experience.
1.2 Problems in Chinese students’ writing
Problems in Chinese students’ writing enjoy diversity. Common problems are mainly reflected
in the aspect of grammar, for which teachers have devoted a lot to mend it.
These problems have drawn the attention of many scholars, who have made some relevant studies,
either on the lexical or the syntactical level. For instance, Yang Yuchen & Wen Zhaorong (1994) made
a detailed analysis on the sentence types used in English writing; Cheng Jingying (1994) used the
contrastive method to analyze the mistakes in students’ writing from the perspective of grammar and
discourse; Zhang Zaixin (1995) analyzed the main problems in students’ writing from the angle of
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rhetoric and grammar.
Many causes result in students’ poor performance in writing. One of the most important reasons
is that English writing has not received enough attention from both teachers and students. For a very
long time, the kernel course for non-English majors has been intensive reading. Only in recent years
have writing and speaking been given more weight in the national syllabus. Even so, students have
long been studying in a passive way (Xue Chen 203). There are not many occasions for them to
express themselves in English, including writing in English.
1. 3 Writing Problems with Pronoun Reference
Generally speaking, English teaching has largely ignored training students’ writing ability on the
discourse level, devoting an unjustifiably large amount of time to training them to write grammatically
correct sentences and expand topic or thesis sentences. Consequently, students’ writing task becomes a
matter of just putting sentences together and that finishes it, without enough considerations for the
cohesive patterns, personal reference patterns in particular.
Moreover, problems on the discourse level draw little attention from both teachers and students.
Among other things, personal reference follows different patterns in the essays of the Chinese students,
sometimes resulting in an incoherent text, to the point of causing serious misunderstanding. These
problems are reflected in the following aspects: 1) Chinese students like to overuse pronouns in their
essays; 2) Chinese students always change their narrative perspective; 3) In their writings, some of the
pronouns used have unclear referents, making the readers confused; 4) First person is used the most
frequently; 5) Third person pronouns are used less frequently; 6) Neither “this” nor “that” is used
frequently. If used, “this” is used more frequently than “that”; 7) If “this” and “that” are used, they are
used more often as determiners than as heads.
In other words, the essay may lack coherence as far as personal reference is concerned. One of
the possible results of such essays written by Chinese students is that the essays will inevitably be
loosely structured, resulting in imprecise and ambiguous logic.
In this thesis, the author intends to explore the causes for such problems and try to offer some
suggestions to minimize the problems.
2. Literature Review
Writing is not “merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks”, as the American
linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1987:136) once remarked. Compared with speaking, which is primarily
listener oriented and is used to promote social interaction, writing is primarily transactional or message
oriented (Brown &Yule 14).
2.1 Classification of English Writing
Essays can be divided into four types: narrative essays, expository essays, descriptive essays and
argumentative essays (Wang Tianming 285). Narrative essays offer the writers a chance to think and
write about themselves and things that happen around. Expository essays are to explain, or to acquaint
the readers with a body of knowledge. Descriptive essays portray people, places, things, moments and
theories with enough vivid details to help the readers form a mental picture of what is being written
about. Argumentative essays writing is a text style of stating reasons by discussing. It is also an
extension of exposition.
Of the four types, argumentative essays writing is the most commonly trained in college English
classrooms and is also the most commonly seen in college English exams. Argumentative essays
writing, also known as persuasive essays writing, is a type of writing in which the writer, through
reasoning, tries to persuade his readers to share or agree with his opinions. Therefore, writing an
argumentative essay demands clear reasoning and careful planning, involving the following skills:
making a sound argument, supporting an argument and developing an argument. In other words, an
argumentative essay consists of three parts: viewpoint, evidence and substantiation. Viewpoint is the
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opinion held by the author, evidence is the reasons and facts used to prove the viewpoint and
substantiation is the process and method of using evidence to prove the viewpoint.
To make an argumentative essay persuasive and forceful, logical relationship between sentences is
very important, and more so as compared with a narrative essay.
2.2 Processes of Writing
To write well, the writers have to sort out their thoughts before deciding how to put all their ideas
in coherent manners on paper. The act of transforming the writers’ thoughts and ideas about a
topic into writing is referred to as the writing process.
(qtd. in Seow 24)
A more reasonable way to look at writing is to see the composing process as a “non-linear,
exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discover and reformulate their ideas as they attempt
to approximate meaning.”
The acquisition of writing does not follow a liner progression from sentence to paragraph and then
to essay. For students, composing or learning to compose should be regarded as a process or a means
which will enable them to realize specific goals at each stage of the composing process which, as
suggested by Seow, incorporates four stages: planning, drafting (writing), revising (redrafting) and
editing.
A written text represents the product of a series of complicated mental operations (Clark 226-58).
Planning ideas, translating the planned contents into sentences, and reviewing ideas are three basic
production processes of writing. This process can be simplified to be steps of moving from concepts,
thoughts, and ideas to writing. After having decided on a meaning to be expressed, the writer has to
consider the genre of text he is trying to write (e.g., a story, a description, or an explanation), the type of
style he is trying to create (e.g., neutral, expressive, or causal), the purpose to be achieved (e.g., to
persuade, to inform, or to warn), and the amount of detail that is needed in order to achieve his purposes.
Therefore, the process of writing is highly complex.
What the writer ultimately writes is not necessarily “good” because it must also be easy to read.
Good writing acknowledges the readers. The readability of a text depends on the ease with which the
readers can identify and integrate its underlying propositions. While readability is primarily a factor at
the level of individual sentences in a text, patterns of organization and structure also exist at a higher
level of organization. In the process of writing, the students may have been taught some grammatical
terminology, such as the terms “noun”, “pronoun”, “verb” and “preposition”, etc. Other writing
sub-skills, which usually form part of later education processes, are organizational features, such as
cohesive devices like personal and demonstrative references discussed in this thesis.
Therefore, writing, as we have said, is not one-dimensional. There are many dimensions, both at
the micro level of vocabulary and syntax and at the macro level of text structure, such as the texture
created by personal and demonstrative references. Both levels are equally important for writing.
Many excellent students do well in the former aspect, but behave poorly in the latter aspect.
2. 3 Teaching of Writing as a Skill
In the 1990’s, methodology for the teaching of writing in ELT classrooms made dramatic
departures from the traditional approaches (Tricia 300).
2. 3. 1 The Product Approach
The approach is referred to as the product approach because its focus is essentially on the ability
to produce correct text or “products” (Richards 106). Its main features are as follows:
1) Learners have specific writing needs, either for institutional writing (produced in a
professional or institutional role, such as that of businessperson, teacher, or student) or personal
writing (including personal letter and creative writing);
2) The goal of a writing program is to teach students to be able to produce the kinds of written
texts they encounter most frequently;
3) The writing program will focus on the patterns and forms of organization used in different
kinds of writing;
4) Correct sentence structure is an essential component of writing; grammatical skills receive
considerable emphasis;
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5) The rhetorical patterns and grammatical rules used in different kinds of writing are presented
in model composition.
This approach focuses the students’ attention on the features of texts and is largely concerned
with developing the students’ ability to produce those features accurately. Techniques used in this
approach often begin with controlled writing exercises and then gradually move towards freer writing
once the students have memorized the structures to be followed. The overall emphasis of the product
approach is hence on the form of the finished product rather than on the process of writing.
2. 3. 2 The Process Approach
In recent years, researchers on writing have come to see the limitations of the product approach to
the teaching of writing. A product approach concentrates on ends rather than means. By focusing on
the form and structure of writing rather than on how writers create writing that has form and structure,
the composing processes of writers are ignored. Many mistakes in students’ essays, including those
made in personal and demonstrative references, result from the ignorance of writing process.
Murray (1980:3) distinguishes three stages in writing: rehearsing, drafting and revising.
Rehearsing, or prewriting, involves looking for ideas about the topic, thinking about the topic, letting
ideas interact, develop and organizing them. When a writer gets a fixed topic, he will think about the
materials to be used and arrange them in his mind. Drafting involves getting ideas onto paper in a
rough form. After sketching out his idea, the writer examines it and writes it on the paper. In this
process, more ideas will be explored. Revising involves evaluating what have been written and
making deletions or additions if necessary. Revising does not mean only rearranging the ideas but also
making the writing more compact and coherent. Therefore, writing can be understood as the
culmination of the three steps in a complicated process.
To be sure, each approach has its own strengths and limitations. A number of fundamental
changes in approaches to the teaching of writing have emerged. In actual writing practice, the two
approaches should be combined to minimize any problems that will appear in the process of writing.
2.4 Relationship between Coherence and Cohesion
Linguists distinguish “coherence”, which captures the content-based connections between the
words that make them produce sense, from “cohesion”, which is the way words formally hang together
in sentences and the like. Coherence has to do with the “global” meaning involved in what we want to
express through our speech activity, whereas cohesion establishes “local” relations between syntactic
items (reference, conjunction and the like). In other words, coherence refers to the way in which the
ideas in a text give it a sense of semantic unity, while cohesion refers to the linking relationships that are
explicitly expressed in the surface structure of a text (Halliday 11).
Coherence is based on semantic relationships, whereas cohesion is determined by lexically and
grammatically overt intersentential relationships. The two aspects of writing interact somewhat, and
yet a text need not be coherent to be cohesive, so cohesion does not guarantee coherence.
For example: John threw the ball toward his head. Balls are used in many sports. Most balls
are sphere, but a football is an ellipsoid. The head leaped to catch the ball. In this short paragraph,
the word “ball” (italic) provides the cohesion of these lines, but the text still sounds incoherent to the
reader. Even if there is cohesion, there isn’t necessarily coherence.
Pronouns can be used to affect coherence. For example: 1) Plato argues that the nature of justice
is more easily observed in the state than it is in the individual. Plato uses the premise that what is
larger is more easily observed; 2) Plato argues that the nature of justice is more easily observed in the
state than it is in the individual. His argument uses the premise that what is larger is more easily
observed;
Both passages express the same information but the second coheres in a way that the first does
not. The coherence is achieved by the use of two words (his argument). The pronoun “his” requires
the readers to find its referent.
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3 Discussions
3. 1 Necessity in Studying Pronoun Reference Patterns in Chinese Students’ Writing
As the author has mentioned in the part of “Introduction”, there are many problems as far as
pronoun reference is concerned. Specifically speaking, these problems are reflected in the following
aspects: 1) Chinese students like to overuse pronouns in their essays; 2) Chinese students always change
their narrative perspective; 3) In their writings, some of the pronouns used have unclear referents,
making the readers confused; 4) First person is used the most frequently; 5) Third person pronouns are
used less frequently; 6) Neither “this” nor “that” is used frequently. If used, “this” is used more
frequently than “that”; 7) If “this” and “that” are used, they are used more often as determiners than as
heads. In a word, these problems seriously impair the cohesive power of the essays.
However, students with a higher level of proficiency have fewer such problems, which shows that
the training of students’ basic language skills should be put on a higher agenda of any classroom
curriculum.
The following example is written by a student with high English proficiency.
Is the test system in college useful?
Nowadays, as the public concerns about education increase, the debate over the test system in 1
college becomes accordingly heat and prevalent. Diverse perceptions towards it vary depending on
individuals.
Some opponents to the present test system in college argue that it is a complete failure as it
doesn’t, to the slightest extent, improve the undergraduates’ competence to cope with the real world. 5
On the contrary, it just aims at cultivating some book worms that are expert at digging into the
details of every sentence in the text book, be it deliberately or unintentionally. Besides, it classifies
students only by how much score they may get rather than resorting to some synthetic methods that
are deemed as more scientific and efficient.
But, still others believe that the present test system is not only available but also necessary. 10
Given the reality of knowledge explosion, some certain decisive system has to form to make the
whole society in coordination. The present test system, which dates from a long time ago, is
empirical and proved to be workable theoretically. What’s more, apart from it, we haven’t yet found
any other alternate as applicable.
15
Debate goes on and never seems to be on the vane. Is the test system in college useful? I won’t
presume to give a conclusive answer, as it’s a question calling for individual minds. (230 Words)
The problems mentioned above seldom appear in this essay. This 230-word essay has 11 pronouns,
which is a low percentage. The writer didn’t change the narrative perspective by keeping referring
students as “they”. Even if the writer himself is the object of the test system, he doesn’t use first
person pronouns to narrate. Instead, he uses “they”. Every pronoun has its clear referent.
However, these problems with pronoun reference might also be overcome after we find out their
causes. It is hoped that teachers will spend adequate time training students to avoid the problems with
pronoun reference after the author has found the causes.
3. 2 Causes of the Problems with Pronominal Cohesion
Unclear pronoun reference makes ideas in sentences less cohesive, vague, and difficult to
understand. Clear pronoun reference between sentences is very important because it can create
pronominal cohesion. In this part of the thesis, the author tries to identify some causes behind the
problems.
1) The difficulty in using pronouns has been underestimated in college English teaching;
After finishing middle school study, students have learned all the personal reference (I, we, you,
they, he, she, it and their various forms) and demonstrative reference (this, that, these and those).
Many students assume that they have mastered the pronouns very well. As a result, both teachers and
students don’t like to spend more time on what they have known since the hours for English classroom
teaching are limited. Students learn many new words every day, but some of them even become
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muddleheaded about the most common word class—pronouns. For example, they don’t know the
answer to this multiple choice question.
Yesterday morning there were only three boys in our classroom
.
A. you, he and I
B. I, you and he
C. he, I and you
D. you, I and he
Many students can’t tell the right answer to this question, neither can they analyze why they
choose it even if he can choose the right answer.
2) Teachers don’t spare enough time teaching writing in class time, and pronominal cohesion is always
ignored by them;
Before coming to university, Chinese students are mainly trained to raise their scores in the
national college entrance exams through learning how to tackle the multiple choice questions. They
are seldom instructed comprehensively in the macro skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, of
which, writing receives the least attention. After the students come into university, college English
teaching often ignores the transitional process of training them to write on the discourse level.
In addition, writing hasn’t become an independent course for non-English majors in most
universities up to now. Writing is always included in the course of intensive reading, but the intensive
reading teachers have so many problems to deal with in class time that not enough time is allotted to the
training of writing, still less to train students to use pronouns to create a coherent text.
Some English teachers do explain some writing methods and skills to students, but these methods
and skills are always taught before the important exams, such as CET-4 and CET-6. The methods only
involve the use of words and sentences and how to develop a paragraph. As a result, many students are
not well informed in the basic concepts of cohesion and coherence. In the writing process, they do not
have the habit of consciously checking the pronouns used and their referents on the discourse level.
3) There is a lack of written exercises about pronominal cohesion in college English textbook;
There are very few exercises about pronoun reference on the discourse level in college English
textbooks. A glance at college English textbooks will reveal that most exercises attached to every unit
are spelling, word construction, preposition and adverbs, verb phrase, proofreading, translation and
cloze, etc, as is shown in Twenty-first Century College English (1999 edition). However, it’s a relief to
see that there are indeed exercises in some textbooks involving the use of pronouns. For example, in
New College English (2002 edition), there are exercises in this aspect and they appear in the form of
“Reference Words”, followed by the directions: “Find the reference words listed below in the passage.
Then write the words or phrases referred to in the space provided. ” (2002: 31)
reference words
words or phrases referred to
1) that (l. 6)
2) (believe) that (is) (l. 23)
3) one (l. 25)
4) it (l. 27)
5) did (l. 35)
6) (have done) this (l. 40)
7) did (l. 43)
8) it (l. 44)
The aim of this kind of exercises is to enhance the students’ ability of recognizing the referents of
pronouns as well as cohesion realized by them. However, exercises of using pronominal reference to
realize cohesion between sentences are still rarely seen in most contemporary college English textbooks
used in China. Teachers can do something to make up for that inadequacy.
4) Students are influenced by the thinking mode of the Chinese language in the process of writing;
In the writing process, the interference of the mother tongue is very strong. What the students do
in English writing is that they always think in Chinese and translate what’s in their minds directly into
English.
A number of writers have argued that different languages have different expectations of how to
organize writing, and that knowledge of conventions in the first language will influence the organization
of texts in the second language writing.
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Both English and Chinese are language tools loaded with different cultural and ideological content.
Matalene (1985:231) ever made a contrastive analysis on the differences of Chinese and English.
Chinese is a parataxis language and the Chinese characters have no change of morphology. It depends
on word order and some empty words (such as pronouns) to express various grammatical relations and
the sentences are separate from each other. Besides, Chinese people like to repeat the pronouns, so the
sentence structure in the Chinese language is relatively loose. English is a hypotaxis language and has
the change of voice, tense, person and number, etc, so it can make use of voice, tense, person to make its
sentence structure more compact. For example:
Wo ren bu zhu wo de li shi pi, jin tian wo yao yin yong yi zhong shen sheng de li shi cai liao, lai
shuo ming zhi mo jue xin li hun shi de xin li. (in Pinyin)
Hu Shi: Miss Zhimo
I can’t bear my keenness on history and want to illustrate a sacred historical material to explain
Xu’s psychology when he decided to divorce.
(Translated by Yang Xianyi)
In English version, the three “wo’s” are all changed: the first “wo” is kept, the second “wo” is
changed into “my” (an adjective pronoun), the third “wo” is omitted and a fourth pronoun “he” is added.
In addition, English pronouns exceed Chinese pronouns in number and use frequency. In both
languages, there are personal reference (first, second and third person) and demonstrative reference.
Pronouns in English are very complicated, and have the change of person, number and case and they
may be one of the hardest word classes that can be fully mastered by English learners. As the above
example has shown, the same “wo” in Chinese version has three totally different forms in English
version.
In a word, students should not think in Chinese and translate it directly into English in the process
of writing. They should be made conscious of how the person system in English works.
5) While writing, students are always influenced by the way of speaking;
As have been discussed in the above section, Chinese students like to use first person in their
essays. This is mainly affected by the way of speaking.
Writing is similar to speaking in that they are both productive and expressive skills. The
difference between speaking and writing is that with the latter, the focus is primarily on what is being
discussed, not on who is doing the discussion or whom the discussion is directed toward.
First person pronouns “I” and “we” occur more frequently in speaking than in writing because
speaking has a higher percentage of words with exophoric reference (Ruslan 83). The speaker always
refers to himself as “I” and to those they are speaking to as “you”, so pronouns with exophoric reference
are more common in speaking than in writing. Expressions such as “I think” and “I know” occur very
frequently in speaking because they allow the speaker to qualify what he is saying. It’s not strange that
some Chinese students also like to use “I think” and “I know” when they express their viewpoints in
writing.
In conversation, people often use expressions such as “it says in this book that….” and “in my
home town they say that….”, etc. These constructions are useful for information transmission because
they allow the speakers to present ideas casually, without supporting evidence. For academic writing,
however, these constructions are either too imprecise or too wordy.
Consequently, first and second person pronouns should occur relatively infrequently in
argumentative essays writing.
6) Students are not clear about the style of essays they are writing;
As mentioned in Section 2. 1, essays writing can be divided into four types: narrative essays
writing, expository essays writing, descriptive essays writing and argumentative essays writing,
according to the style. Different styles have different requirements for the use of pronouns.
Students seem to be more familiar with narrative essays than other styles, resulting in that they
always apply the writing method in narrative essays to other essays. Narrative essays are the earliest
style the students are instructed to write. When they begin to learn English in junior high school, they
are always required to write a short article about their family and school, etc. In such topics, the
students are the main characters, so they always use first person “I” to stress themselves. For example:
“In my family there are three people—my father, my mother and I. My father is a doctor, and my
mother is a teacher. I am a middle school student. I work very hard and I am a good student….”
（
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）
The kind of traditional narrative method gradually becomes fixed in their mind but it is the typical
expression mode of narrative essays, not that of argumentative essays.
Besides, words used in argumentative essay should not be too colloquial, which is not the case
with narrative essays. Pronoun reference in argumentative essays is more standardize. Generally
speaking, the narrative perspective should be kept uniform and the argument should sound more
objective and impersonal.
Therefore, students should make clear the style to be written before they set out to write.
3.3 Suggestions for Solving the Problems with Pronominal Cohesion in Chinese Students’ Writings
English writing is an important means of developing the students’ intelligence and capability, and
the training of writing is becoming more and more important than before.
In this thesis, the author explored the causes for typical patterns of pronominal cohesion in
Chinese students’ argumentative essays. With more and more attention drawn to the cohesion and
coherence of an essay, some problems with pronominal cohesion can be overcome with the right
approaches to the taken.
1) Teachers should draw students’ attention to the correct use of pronouns and students should do more
exercises;
It is not easy to use pronouns in a correct way even for a learner who has learnt English for many
years, so teachers should train the students in this respect from the very beginning and keep training
them as time goes on.
First of all, teachers, together with the students, can analyze the regular patterns of pronominal
cohesion in good English writing, so that students are made more conscious of pronoun reference in
achieving cohesion between different sentences.
2) Students themselves can try the following strategies to avoid the problems with pronoun reference
before finishing writing;;
During the final editing process, read all the way through the draft, focusing only on
pronouns;
Circle each pronoun and draw an arrow to its referent. If there isn’t a referent or if the
referent isn’t grammatically equal to the pronoun, revise the sentence by using one of these strategies:
a. Replace the pronoun with a noun to eliminate a vague pronoun reference;
b. Supply missing referents where needed;
c. Revise sentences which contain more than one possible antecedent or contain an implied
referent. Make the pronoun reference clear and unambiguous.
For example, “the client told James that he had to come to therapy.” After hearing that, the
readers will ask: who has to come to therapy—the client or James? The following revision can
eliminate the ambiguity: the client told James, “you have to come to therapy.”
①
②
Another example, “after braiding Ann’s hair, Sue decorated them with ribbons.” The pronoun
“them” refers to Ann’s braids (implied by the term braiding), but the word “braids” did not appear in the
sentence. It should be changed as the following: after braiding Ann’s hair, Sue decorated the braids
with ribbons.
However, before trying the above-mentioned strategies, students should make clear whether
pronoun reference (it, this and that) has been used as extended reference or text reference, but that is not
the case with “I, you, he, she and they”.
After doing such exercises repeatedly, students will become more and more conscious of the
patterns of pronoun reference in their writings. The best way to develop the students’ skills with
regard to pronoun reference is to focus attention on pronouns until clear, explicit pronoun reference
becomes a habit of writing.
3) While writing, students should try their best to overcome the influence of Chinese pronouns on
English pronoun reference;
Chinese is a parataxis language and the Chinese characters have no change of morphology. It
depends on word order and some empty words to express various grammatical relationships. However,
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English is a hypotaxis language and has change of voice, tense, person and number, etc.
In fact, English learners are not only affected by their mother tongue but also benefit from it.
While learning a second language, the learner should try to minimize the negative influences of his
mother tongue in order to benefit more from it.
As for pronominal cohesion, teachers should spend much time distinguishing Chinese pronouns
with English pronouns in the English classroom, and make Chinese students clearly understand the
differences between them. The students should gradually learn to transform parataxis thinking mode
into hypotaxis thinking mode and learn to combine the information expressed by several Chinese
sentences into a complex English sentence. After repeating this kind of exercises for many times,
students can change loose structure in Chinese into compact structure in English. Only written in this
way do the essays exhibit coherence and cohesion. Otherwise, the English sentences will be deformed,
run-together and piled directly by many simple clauses without enough cohesive relationships between
each other. For example: Her eyes are big. Her hair is long. Her skin is fair. She is charming.
Many boys fall in love with her at the first sight.
This short passage is written according to traditional Chinese thinking mode, so it has many
pronouns (5 “her’s”) and the structure is very loose, with five simple clauses. It should be changed as
the following: the girl with big eyes, long hair and fair complexion is so charming that many boys fall in
love with her at the first sight.
In general, when writing, the students should be encouraged to think in English rather than think
in Chinese and then translate what they want to express into English.
4) Students should learn to integrate reading with writing effectively and master more cohesive devices
through reading;
Reading and writing are two related language skills and depend on each other. Reading in the
classroom is understood as the appropriate input for acquisition of writing skills because it is
generally assumed that reading passages will somehow function as primary models from which
writing skills can be learned, or at least inferred.
(qtd. in Kroll 88)
Therefore, through reading, students can learn how good writers put sentences together and
organize ideas. In the process of reading, the students should try to learn different cohesive devices
and the corresponding expression modes. This can be done by students keeping asking themselves
“what does this refer to?” With this question always repeated in their minds, the students will
gradually build up the awareness of cohesion of a text. After a long time, the students will learn to
apply the cohesive devices learned through reading to the practice of writing.
Teachers should also emphasize the relationship between reading and writing and at the same time
treat reading texts on the discourse level. The students’ ability of using pronoun reference to achieve
cohesion in writing will be raised accordingly.
5) Teachers should combine the product approach with the process approach in teaching writing;
In the past few years, English teachers often adopt the product approach to teach students, who
always used the techniques of “controlled composition” or “guided writing” instead of being allowed
freedom to create their own writings. With this approach, many mistakes in the writing process are
totally neglected by both teachers and students. What the students care most is the finished product,
not the details of writing, among which is pronominal cohesion. On the contrary, the process approach
focuses its attention on the means and processes of writing and can compensate for the losses of product
approach. Pronominal cohesion is best achieved through writing as a process of writing.
4. Conclusion
In Chinese English classroom teaching, the difficulty and importance in training writing have been
underestimated for a very long time. Much attention is paid to the words used and correct grammar.
Even if students can write grammatically correct sentences, their writings may still lack cohesive power
and coherence on the whole.
With the reform of English language teaching, English writing has gained more attention than
before. The focus of writing has gradually been shifted to the structure and organization of an essay
though the attention is still deplorably inadequate. Therefore, if writing is treated as creating a
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structurally and semantically unified text, more attention should be directed to how the text is
constructed. Of no less importance are the cohesive relationships between sentences and paragraphs
which are necessarily for the resulting text to be coherent.
There are many problems with pronoun reference used in writing as to lead to a lack of
pronominal cohesion in the essays. The pronominal reference used by Chinese students follows
different patterns, sometimes resulting in an incoherent text, to the point of causing serious
misunderstanding in some cases.
In this thesis, the author explored the causes for the problems with pronoun reference and offered
some suggestions to minimize the differences. To increase students’ and teachers’ awareness of the
problems and to effectively raise the students’ capability of achieving pronominal cohesion in their
essays, the author proposes the following suggestions: 1) Teachers should draw students’ attention to the
correct use of pronouns and students should do more exercises; 2) Students themselves can try some
strategies to avoid the problems with pronoun reference before finishing writing; 3) While writing,
students should try their best to overcome the influence of Chinese pronouns on English pronoun
reference; 4) Students should learn to integrate reading with writing effectively and master more
cohesive devices through reading; 5) Teachers should combine the product approach with the process
approach in teaching writing;
It is true that the training of writing should start from the training of some basic language skills,
but it should also be geared towards the style and some basic requirements of what makes a text a text,
such as unity, cohesion and coherence. The author hopes that the suggestions are somewhat useful for
helping students to avoid the problems with pronoun reference in their writings.
Due to the limited space, this thesis can’t be very comprehensive and exhaustive. There still
remains much to be further investigated in this field and many more problems must be clarified. Due
to the author’s limited knowledge, some defects will be inevitable. The author hopes that more
researches will be carried out in this field and more effective exercises can be designed to cope with
them.
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