On Vague Language And Its Application In Second Language Learning

Vagueness in language has been studied for many years by many scholars and researchers at home and broad. American scientist L. Zadeh is the first who has proposed the concept of "fuzzy set". After him, many scholars begin to apply this construct into many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, natural science and social science. However, most of them have discussed it from philosophical and fuzzy mathematical point of view. Channell (2000) is the first person who analyzes the vagueness from the angle of language teaching, but she only tries to analyze and describe some vague expressions in English language. She does not propose a set of principles of how to utilize vagueness in second language teaching and learning.This paper is an attempt at the study of the vagueness and its application in second language teaching and learning. Firstly, it gives a general introduction of vague phenomena in language use and the necessities to probe into this research; secondly, it surveys the theoretical study of vague language and its pedagogical implications in the past; thirdly, it studies the influences of vagueness in language on EFL learning; and finally, it focuses on the applications of vagueness principles in second language learning.Traditionally, it is believed that "good" English uses involve, among other things, clarity and precision, while "bad" English is caused by vagueness, which is to be avoided. The paper holds that vagueness in language is neither "bad" nor "good", independent of context. The appropriate use of vague language is what really counts and constitutes an important aspect of the communicative competence. The paper argues that the process of using language is an active process in which speakers and hearers constantly have to make choices out of variables. Since vagueness is a very important language variable and our utterances are full of uncertainties and vagueness, the same amount of attention should be attached to the teaching of the appropriate uses of vagueness.The paper proposes some principles relating to the teaching and learning of vague language use: the principle of tolerance of ambiguity, the principle of appropriate selection and the cognitive learning style of inference and guessing. If students can make full use of the vagueness in language, their communicative competence of using second language will be greatly improved.