An Analysis Of Non-english Majors' Pragmatic Failure And Its Implications For College English Teaching

Cross-cultural pragmatic failure has attracted much attention in the field of pragmatics and applied linguistics. The term "pragmatic failure" is adopted from an article by J. Thomas (1983) .She states that pragmatic failure refers to the inability to understand" what is meant by what is said ". G.Leech (1983) said "the transfer of the norms of one community to another may well lead to pragmatic failure". In other words, pragmatic failure refers to communication breakdown resulting from being unable to realize a variety of pragmatic differences. Different from grammatical errors, pragmatic failure may be regarded as a fact that a non-English native speaker is being deliberately impolite, unfriendly, or even rude.Scanning the works and articles about pragmatic failure, we find that the subjects being investigated are almost all English majors. Some researchers (Hong Gang, Yan Zhuang) have come to basically the same conclusion. That is, pragmatic competence does not necessarily develop with the length of time the learners study English in college.As for non-English majors, few concerns are shown to their pragmatic failure. In fact, the study of non-majors' English learning is also an important field that should not be neglected.In the current college English teaching, a complete and independent teaching system has been formed. Although the new-3-/syllabus for non-majors has formulated the aim of teaching: to promote the communicative competence to meet the communication needs of the country, the college English teachers pay more attention to linguistic competence rather than pragmatic competence. For this reason, I conducted a research on non-English majors' pragmatic competence in Qufü Normal University in Sept., 1998 and try to find out whether the subjects exhibited similar pragmatic competence in spite of their different linguistic backgrounds. The ultimate purpose of the research is to discover the causes of pragmatic failure, identify a practical solution and improve the students' pragmatic competence.The thesis is divided into 6 parts including the introduction and conclusion. Following a brief introduction of the definition and categories of pragmatic failure, I have explained the reasons why I have chosen non-English majors as the subjects.Chapter One is the design of research on the cross-cultural pragmatic skills of the students at Qufu Normal University, who are randomly selected from 8 classes in the 1 st-year and 3rd-year grades. Its contents include hypothesis, subjects, materials, method, reliability and validity.In Chapter Two, the data analysis suggests that the learnerst pragmatic competence does not manifest significant differences to match their different linguistic backgrounds. This phenomenon is similar to that of English majors.Chapter Three is the theoretical analysis from a pragmatic-4-/1'point of view. Some important pragmatic theories, such as deixis, presupposition, speech act theories, adjacency pairs and politeness principles, are applied to explain the causes of pragmatic failure. The conclusion is that the learners who are not fully aware of the pragmatic differences existing in Chinese and English, may exhibit pragmatic failure. To divide in detail, pragmalinguistic failure may arise from two major sources: teaching-induced errors and pragmalinguistic transfer. Sociopragmatic failure stems from cross-culturally different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behavior.In Chapter Four, we have tried to find out the implications for college English teaching and make some tentative suggestions, such as, integrating culture into language class, introducing pragmatic knowledge about target language, incorporating cooperative learning into traditional method, making full use of various aids. There are still a lot of problems existing in current college English teaching. The thesis aims at challenging the teachers to improve non-English majors' pragmatic competence.