Oral Communication: The Pragmatic Perspective

Oral communication is a very common phenomenon in human life. During the firstutterance 揋ood morning?to the last utterance 揋ood night? people perform numerouscommunicative activities every day. The ability to carry out oral communicationsuccessfully is very important for human beings. The importance not only lies in dailylife, but also in work. In fact, it is communication that brings about endless joys forhuman beings, who are regarded as social persons. Without language and thecommunication resulted from it, a modern human being may live as an organism, but hecan not thrive as a successful social person, at least he is deprived of the enjoyments ofa social person. Most oral communication is carried out in one抯 mother tongue. Ingeneral, people have no difficulty in communicating with each other in their mothertongues or 1n the varieties of their mother tongues. However, as far as a foreignlanguage (In this dissertation, English is referred as particularly) is concerned, one canfind Out that it is not very satisfactory. Chinese university students can get very highscores in English examination, but they can not carry out some simple oralcomntrnnication tasks successfully. With the increasing demands of oral communication,it poses a great challenge for both English teaching and learning in China.Oral communication differs from written communication greatly. The greatestdifference is their emphasis on accuracy. Oral communication is more context-bonded,and it has more channels to give out information and to perceive information thanwritten form do. Therefore, appropriacy appears more important than accuracy thoughthe correctness of information is the basic requirement of oral communication. Agrammatical correct sentence may be inappropriate in oral communication whereas agrammatical incorrect sentence may be appropriate in oral communication.Chinese English learners feel particularly difficult with oral communication. This is48Oral Comm unk~ation. the Pragmatic Perspectivepartly due to our teaching and learning methods, and partly related to our lack ofrecognition of the importance of oral communication. We have always been adoptingthe methods of 搕eacher centered?and 揼rammar + translation? We have always beenputting our emphasis on reading in teaching and learning. Since Hymes put forward histheory 揅ommunicative Competence?in 1 970s, many scholars in the west haveelaborated on how to communicate successfully. Of course, they look at the problemmainly from the point of view of the native speakers. Some Chinese scholars also havecarried out some researches in this aspect, though not very systematic. The authorbelieves that a relative systematic study of oral communication from the pragmaticperspective will contribute to the appropriacy of it for English learners in China.This dissertation comprises six chapters:Chapter One is an introduction, which presents the importance of oralcommunication. The author also discusses some concepts related such as languageusage and language use, grammatical correctness and communicative appiopriacy andtheir differences and relationships, the previous studies and the organization of thework.Chapter Two surveys the characteristics of oral communication. It points out thatoral communication is more difficult for non-native speakers to handle with because itis a continuum process, it is unpredictable and more context-bonded, and it disappearsmore quickly. Compared with written communication, oral communication is morerestrained by co-text, time, place, occasion and participants.Chapter Three discusses the non-verbal cues applied in oral communication. Itintroduces and compares the uses of voice features and body language of Englishspeakers and Chinese speakers. It indicates that to understand and to use the changes ofmeanings by the variations of tones and body languages is a key for Chinese Englishle...