A Study Of Chinese Efl Learners' Pragmatic Failures In Oral Communication

Interlanguage pragmatics is a sun-discipline of second language acquisition research. In recent years,a substantial body of researches emerged,studying ESL or EFL learners' pragmatic performance in interlingual communication. The study on learners' pragmatic failures contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural communicative competence. According to this perspective,the researcher has conducted a qualitative study of Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic failures in oral communication and tried to classify the failures and explore the sources resulting in the failures.When people from different cultures communicate with each other using the same language,they always encounter breakdown of conversation or misunderstanding as a result of the difference in thinking,discourse pattern,values,and connotation. This kind of misunderstanding or breakdown caused by the difference is known as Pragmatic Failures. Based on the research findings of the previous studies,this study employs the research framework of interlanaguage pragmatics as the guidance to describe and analyse 40 scenarios collected and identified by means of natural observation and retrospective interview with each containing at least one pragmatic failure.From the perspective of pragmatics and interlanguage theory,the author conducted an analysis of the pragmatic failures,and then grouped them according to the 6 sources,i.e. inadequate comprehension,inappropriate transfer,teaching-induced error,pragmatic overgeneralization,social norm difference,and affective state. This grouping is followed by a detailed description and explanation. Based on this then,the author goes on to further point out that developing learners' ability to perform speech acts and promoting their cultural awareness are two major tasks for EFL instruction.