Study On Pragmatic Failure In Intercultural Communication From Schema Theory And Its Enlightenment On Innovation Of ELT

With the increasing development of internationalization, many foreign language users have ever experienced pragmatic failure in intercultural communication, although they are linguistically competent, or they can speak English fluently. Hence, how to avoid pragmatic failure and cultivate pragmatic competence have become the top issues of language researching and teaching. Pragmatic failure, as it is, firstly proposed by Jenny Thomas in her Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure in 1983 refers to the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. Pragmatic failure is much more complicated than simple grammar mistakes as the former touches the deeper elements of language like context, culture even psychology and cognition of human being. During the last 20 years or so, linguists have carried out pragmatic failure basing on the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle and the Relevance Theory which are confined to the study of its linguistic and socio-linguistic factors, not on the role of cognitive-psychological elements. Therefore, the current situation motivates the author to embark on the task of exploring the possibility of applying the Schema Theory to expounding pragmatic failure in intercultural communication from cognitive perspective.The Schema Theory in modern cognitive-psychology holds that people's knowledge is stored in long-term memory in the form of schema and schema, as the base of cognition, is a person's whole knowledge. People process any information of the world with the help of cognitive schemata to explain, predict, organize as well as assimilate the coming information.Basing on the above theory, this dissertation, at the outset, conducts a questionnaire to investigate the current situation of pragmatic failure and then the author creatively adopts the Schema Theory to explain pragmatic failure in intercultural communication from the inference, variation and absence of schema. Consequently, in this thesis, the author goes to great lengths to redefine pragmatic failure enlightened by the cognitive schema as"the pragmatic failure is committed in the process of interpreting or expressing utterances (both verbal and non-verbal) due to the variance or absence of schemata or inability to activate the exiting schemata, as a result, they cannot connect new information with the mental schemata and comprehend their counterpart's intention". Therefore, various kinds of pragmatic failure arise and communication ends in failure.Furthermore, in the light of the cognitive analysis, this thesis provides an innovative remedy, namely,"4+T Teaching Strategy"including Chinese and English comparison reading, internet-mediated autonomy learning, student-centered interactions, translation skill input and teacher instruction. The main target of this strategy is to activate and construct schemata of language learners for avoiding pragmatic failure and even cultivating pragmatic competence. In addition, the feasibility and validity of this teaching innovation has been checked through empirical researches and the result persuasively proves the former hypothesis that activation and construction of schemata in form of"4+T Teaching Strategy"can enhance both linguistic and pragmatic competence in a large scale.In brief, the final purpose of this paper aims at giving some theoretical support for the shift from traditional methodology to activation and construction of schema in ELT so as to develop students'cultural awareness, pragmatic competence and minimize the possibility of pragmatic failure in intercultural communication.