English pronouns in the writing of some Batswana students

Abstract

This paper examines the morphological and syntactic differences between English and Setswana pronouns, and how these differences manifest in students usage of English learners may be assisted to become more proficient in using English pronouns. An analysis of 542 essays written by second and fourth year students of the Department of English reveal the following categories of pronoun errors: the intrusion of an independent subject pronoun between a subject and its verb, the conflation of the standard expression the one...the other into the other...the other, inter substitution of they/there/their, lack of gender and case distictions, use of pronouns without antecedents and pronoun referent agreement errors. In terms of the sources of these errors, the paper shows that the first six types of errors seem to relate directly or indirectly to the morphological and syntactic structures of Setswana pronouns while the last type is largely intralingual. The paper recommends that policy, tests and exams in country. It also suggests that teachers should raise their awareness of Botswama English in order to be able to distinguish between learners usage that are unpredictable and those that have become systematic localisms, and delegate more learning resposibility to the learners themselves.