Tukukkk

A teacher asked me this question and I am having a hard time finding a simple way to explain it for her to share with her students. I`m looking for the easiest way to explain it to her because she teaches Junior High School English in Japan.

The students were given a picture prompt and expected to answer with,

"Who is the girl playing the piano?"

Many of the students wrote,

"Who is she playing the piano?"

How would I explain, in a very simple way, why you cannot use she here?

Thank you so much for your help!

You can use she, if you pause to make the meaning clear:

Who is she, playing the piano?

Without the pause, this is a kind of "garden path" sentence, because it leads you to a wrong expectation about how the sentence will end, creating a cognitive dissonance.

Once you hear "who is she playing..." you expect the sentence to end with something like "at tennis on Tuesday?", and the question to be about who she is playing against, rather than who she is to begin with.

When you are asking about identity, it is a good idea to give the category of person,
- student
- teacher
- man, woman, child
- person
- your friend, their friend etc.

Who is she? [she is not identified at all]. She is my friend and a nice person.
Who is your friend playing the piano?
Who is that person playing the piano?
Who is that playing the piano? [that=that person]

That's the easiest answer I can come up with.

I would explain it very simply: a pronoun is supposed to refer clearly to a noun, usually one that precedes the pronoun. The meaning of "pronoun" is something that takes the place of a noun.

An interrogative pronoun will normally not be preceded by a noun because of the way questions are formed in English, but the expectation is that the noun being referred to will follow the pronoun quickly. In the sentence recommended against, there is no noun at all for either "she" or "who."

Thus, the sentence is awkward and not highly idiomatic. I do not think it is ungrammatical, but it is hard to follow. It still would be a bit odd, but much clearer to say "Who is she that is playing the piano." Now the entire clause will be heard as a substitute for a specific noun.

My two cents:

I've learned that there is a little difference left between using 'who,' and 'whom.' The easiest way (as a non-native speaker), I can say the students should use the girl instead of the pronoun to avoid ambiguity.

We often say,

She is buying me a doll.

Here, we have a subject, indirect object, and direct object.

If you remove the indirect object, the question could be formed as:

Who is she buying a doll?

There is me in the sentence and thus, the answer is me.

But, in your question, it becomes ambiguous.

Who is she playing the piano?

The answer could be *'she's playing her brother the piano.'*

Replacing the pronoun with a noun (girl) ends all the ambiguities. There, clearly, the subject is playing the piano...and of course for no one!