Pragmatic Failures And Defects Of Passive Input

From Course in General Linguistic of Saussure and Syntactic Structure of Chomsky, the goal of linguistic research is the language system rather than the application of language. Not until Hymes proposed the notion of communicative competence did people begin to pay attention to language application. Pragmatic competence, as an essential component of communicative competence, refers to learners' ability to use appropriate forms of language in communications. It should be the main purpose of ESL teaching. Teachers have made great efforts to improve students' pragmatic competence, but according to the empirical study the author did on subjects with pre-advanced English language proficiency, pragmatic failures are still common among them.English teaching in China is, to a great extend, input-oriented. Teachers improve students' linguistic and pragmatic ability by repeated and enormous input. It is based on the Input Hypothesis proposed by Krashen. He suggests that language acquisition can take place if input is a little beyond students' existing knowledge and that quality of language acquisition mainly relies on the quality and quantity of input. It is essentially a passive view of input because it ignores the subjective initiative of learners. The author tries to explain the limitation of passive input and the four reasons of pragmatic failures: pragmatic structure of discourse, speech rules, politeness strategy and indirect speech act.Finally, the author proposes that language acquisition is a multi-natured process, in which some factors can be acquired by passive input while others need learners' cognition. To improve their pragmatic competence, learners should improve their consciousness to culture and awareness to context. To give full play to students' subjective initiative, teachers should apply the exceeding-expectation strategy.