American Students In Acquiring Chinese Social Pragmatic Investigation And Analysis Of Errors

Any language is the carrier of a particular culture. In cross-cultural communication, the learner of a target-language is influenced by the cultural backgrounds and cultural conventions of both the target-language and his/her mother tongue that lead to the occurrence of pragmatic failures of non-linguistic factors. This thesis investigates the phenomenon of socio-pragmatic failures by American learners of Chinese and explores into the deep cultural reasons why these pragmatic failures have occurred.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is the Introduction. Chapter Two is a summary of the status quo in the field of research of this subject and a survey of six textbooks of Chinese as a second language in which we found that pragmatic problems have not been handled properly or even neglected. Chapters Three and Four are the main body of the thesis. Chapter Three describes and analyses the socio-pragmatic failures by American learners from seven aspects. In Chapter Four, we suggest that teachers of Chinese as a second language should enhance their pragmatic awareness in teaching and that should be the key to cultivate the students'pragmatic competence. Chapter Five is the Conclusion. .