A Study On Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure And ELT

Grammatical knowledge is traditionally viewed as the most important, even the onlyelement in English teaching. However, most students are not adaptive and cannot useEnglish to communicate with the native speakers of English appropriately, though theyhave a large vocabulary and have a good command of the rules of grammar. D. Hymesbelieved that linguistic theory was connected with language in use and integrated withtheory of communication and culture. He proposed the concept of communicativecompetence, pointing out that the competent communicator must have a knowledge ofhow to use language appropriately and effectively. He must know when and where tospeak, what to talk about, and in what manner to speak. Based on Hymes' notion ofcommunicative competence, Canale and Swain have developed, it and made it moreinfluential. According to them, communicative competence is composed of fourcomponents: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competenceand strategic competence..With the development of science and technology, cross-cultural communicationbecomes more and more important. It is obvious that teachers should develop the students'communicative competence and treat it as the goal of ELT. But the students have variouskinds of problems when they are encountering native speakers of English. Thisdissertation aims to explore these problems膒ragmatic failure. In view of the detailedexploration on pragmatic failure, this dissertation also suggests a multidimensionalsyllabus to help students avoid the occurrence of pragmatic failure and thus get rid of thebarriers to successful communication.Pragmatic failure was first proposed by Jenny Thomas as the inability to understandwhat is meant by what is said. According to Thomas, pragmatic failure is an area of cross-Abstract49cultural communication breakdown and pragmatic failure has occurred on any occasion onwhich H perceives the force of S's utterance as other than S intended she or he shouldperceive. In recent years. many Chinese scholars and teachers have begun to realize that inSino-American communication pragmatic failure occurs mainly because .of the lack ofcultural knOwledge. This dissertation explores the three types of pragmatic failure and therelationship between pragmatic failure and culture. It presents the contrastive explanationbetween the key patterns of Chinese dominant culture and those of American dominantculture and cultural differences in verbal and nonverbal processes.This dissertation aims to explore the students' problems in cross-culturalcommunication膒ragmatic failure, the relationship between language and pragmaticfailure, the relationship between culture and pragmatic failure, and then puts forward amultidimensional syllabus, which covers grammar, culture and pragmatic principles, toassist students to get rid of the barriers to successful communication, and thus to achievethe goal of ELT.This dissertation consists of five chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction, which indicates the objective of ELT, presentsthe current situation of ELT in China, and outlines the general structure of thisdissertation.Chapter Two discusses the notion of communicative competence and its development.It reviews Chomsky's distinction between competence and performance, Hymes' notionof communicative competence and the development of the concept of communicativecompetence by Canale and Swain.Chapter Three discusses the communication breakdown in cross-culturalcommunication. It focuses on the investigation of the three kinds of pragmatic failure,which gives rise to cross-cultural communication breakdown. The relationship betweenpragmatic failure and culture is given considerable emphasis. This chapter traces thecultural differences back to...