A Study On Chinese Efl Learners' Pragmatic Failure In Verbal Communication

Pragmatic failure is a long-standing phenomenon in verbal communication. It usually exists in various forms of communication and communicative activities in different linguis- tic and cultural backgrounds. Its history, first proposed as a language phenomenon, is short—only twenty-eight years from the time that British scholar Jenny Thomas introduced the concept in her master's dissertation in 1982. Since then, scholars at home and abroad have paid much attention to pragmatic failure. Particularly, Chinese scholars have fallen over themselves in their research of the concept.Indeed, pragmatic failure in verbal communication often causes misunderstanding. Although some incidents of pragmatic failure do not cause serious consequences, others do. Some of these consequences can be quite serious. Hence, scholars are seriously pursuing their studies of this concept. Pragmatic failure in verbal communication remains an impor- tant area of research. Such special research is rare abroad. Furthermore, as far as we know, till today no scholar at home or abroad has used pragmatic failure as a Ph.D. research title. Thus, pragmatic failure is the subject of this dissertation.The dissertation attempts to carry out a systematic research approach to provide an empiric study of the theory of pragmatic failure in verbal communication. The framework of the dissertation is primarily made up of five parts:To start with, we have defined the research subject, which is about the pragmatic failure in language communication or verbal communication. Through research we think that"verbal communication"being translated into"言语交际"should be more equivalent and accurate in Chinese so that we decide to use"言语交际中语用失误"as the topic for our project; Secondly we have mainly explained the underlying reasons for pragmatic failure. We have mainly discussed three interdisciplinary research areas: cross-cultural pragmatics, inter-language pragmatics and inter-cultural communication, which the study of pragmatic failure is closely related. Thirdly we have systematically summarized the related studies on pragmatic failure as a special subject at home and abroad. Meanwhile we have explained the similarities and differences among pragmatic failure, misunderstanding, error, misleading, mistake, ambiguity, pragmatic ambivalence, etc. Fourthly we have made an empirical research on pragmatic failure through Chinese EFL learners of six–proficiency levels and used the findings to make a contrastive analysis with HE Ziran and YAN Zhuang's research in 1986. Finally we have figured out 10 causes and proposed respective strategies for avoiding pragmatic failure. Our study verifies our hypothesis:Through more than 20 years' research and development, Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic failure is still not uncommon and we are not allowed to be optimistic and need further study to improve Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence and reduce pragmatic failure.Our findings can be summarized briefly as follows:1. Through the thorough investigation of pragmatic failure we have found Thomas' four big achievements and eight disadvantages of her research and summarized the eleven characteristics in the three research stages of pragmatic failure in China (see 4.2).2. Through the empirical study we have found that Chinese EFL learners have three features on pragmatic failure: (1) The rate of pragmatic failure of low-age EFL learners is usually higher than that of high-age learners, which has a statistic significance but not salient differences among them; (2) The rate of linguo-pragmatic failure is usually higher than that of socio-pragmatic failure and (3) The rate of pragmatic failure with a single-answer choice is much lower than that with a multiple-answer choice. Furthermore both (2) and (3) have not only a statistical significance but also salient differences. These findings fully verify our hypothesis (see 5.5).Although the dissertation orients the research toward Chinese EFL learners, the results and findings of the project are also helpful and significant for other language learners.