Comparative Study of the Text Function of Personal Pronouns in Chinese College English Writing

Personal reference is a sub-type of cohesive ties.Personal reference relations is mainly consist of personal pronouns.This research compares the usage of Personal Reference between Chinese EFL learners' writing and the native learners' by using corpora and statistic tools.Statistics shows that there is significant difference between them.Chinese English learner's writing is more colloquial.They overuse the first and second person pronouns,which are very weak to form the cohesive relation,while under use most of the third person pronouns which are inherently cohesive.The major reasons for the differences may due to the culture difference,mother tongue transfer and lack of stylistic awareness.The implications for EFL teaching are also considered in the last part.