Analysis of Third Person Pronouns with Gender Semantic Features in Elementary School Mandarin Textbooks

Research in the past has shown that gender semantic cues for personal pronouns are essential for reading comprehension and it can be applied to teaching. Therefore, it is crucial to examine how semantic cues are used in textbooks today. This study analyzes the appropriateness of gender semantic cues for third person pronouns in elementary school level textbooks published by three publishers: Kang-Xuan, Han-Lin, and Nan-Yi. The findings are as follows: (1) All three editions use various names for different genders with clear semantic cues. (2) As for the sequence used when learning pronouns, the character representing the third person pronoun “he” is learned earlier than that for “she.” This sequence is shown in all three textbooks. Lastly, the present study propose listing the character for the female pronoun in the formal vocabulary, putting characters representing pronouns for different genders in the same lesson, and introducing the relationships between pronouns and composition cohesion in a separate small unit. It is recommended that future research focus on the pronoun resolution ability of children in different learning stages and how semantic cues in second person pronouns could influence pronoun resolution.