To further fix gender and pronouns, quickfire word association games work well to speed up accurate production and focus on these small forms as important for a wider purpose. For example, when making sentences about jobs, use clear images of men and women doing those jobs, and teach full sentences (he is a policeman / she is a policewoman) rather than just drilling individual words. One solution is to teach pronouns alongside gender-related vocabulary at early stages of study. What can we do about it? With only two genders to choose from, one would think that learners would make mistakes only around 50% of the time, but in my experience, usage of pronouns is so confused, and so randomly applied, that even at higher levels of study, many learners have problems most of the time. In addition, a unit of language as small as a pronoun, whose meaning can be guessed from the context of the rest of a sentence (as in the sentence example above – a husband is clearly a man, so the confusion is reduced), this error often goes uncorrected and therefore becomes fossilised, meaning it is more difficult to correct in the long run. Why? Cantonese uses the same spoken form for male and female pronouns, so the concept of different words for "he" and "she" is often glossed over for the sake of fluent communication (the message is more important than hanging around to think about which pronoun to use). What’s the problem? Confusion between masculine and feminine pronouns, often used interchangeably even within a single sentence. We will think about the errors in terms of where they come from, the effects they have on wider communication, and what we can do as English language teachers to address the problem in class. This article focuses on the most common errors found in English as used by Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Sometimes patterns of grammar or pronunciation get carried over from their first language (L1 transfer issues), and sometimes a feature exists in English that is not present in their first language. Users of English from different language backgrounds have specific issues with language for a variety of reasons.
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