Analyzing Pragmatic Failures In Higher Vocational And Specialized College (HVSC) Students' Spoken English

With the globalization of the world, more and more communication crossing nations and cultures are enhanced. English, as an international language, is learned and studied by more and more people. China, as a nation with a large number of English learners is attaching more and more importance to the learning and teaching of English, which as a tool for communication and information exchange, can play its proper role only when used properly.The Higher Vocational and Specialized Colleges (HVSC) Students English teaching aims to improve the students'English communicative ability, which has been the heated concern of various studies and researches. Pragmatic failure, as an important part of pragmatics, can be traced back to the Semiotics study in the 20th century. In the viewpoint of Semiotics, pragmatics deals with the relations of sign both with the users and the interpreters. People who come from different background but communicate using the same language will inevitably encounter failures or misunderstanding. Misunderstanding occurring on such occasions can be termed as pragmatic failures. Based on the research findings of the previous studies, this study employs the theory of Interlingua pragmatics as the leading theory to describe and analyze 26 scenarios collected and identified by means of natural observation and retrospective interview with each containing at least one pragmatic failure.The thesis explores the origins of the pragmatic failures based on the materials collected from the students in HVSC and group them as follows:i.e. comprehension failure, negative influence of the first language or mother tongue, pragmatic overgeneralization, classroom teaching,,and the negative effect of cultural background.As a college English teacher, the author of present thesis puts forward some practical suggestions for college English classroom teaching. The HVSC teaching staffs are supposed to strengthen their research by self-study, study further at home and abroad. And the colleges and government are expected to take various means, like increasing the investment in research, to stimulate more interest of the teachers in English teaching research. And finally the oral English should occupy a higher percentage in the English exam system in HVSC.