A Study Of Intercultural Pragmatic Failure And Its Implications For College English Classroom Teaching

The traditional way of linguistic studies in the past few decades have been focused on language itself. The subject has mainly been confined to the form of language or the construction of sentences, i.e. competence in Chomsky's term or langue in Saussure's term, with little attention paid to the close relationship between language and society and culture. Since the establishment of socio-linguistics and pragmatics, the focus of linguistic study has shifted from the form of a language to its function or language use. With the increasing development of intercultural communication between cultures and common occurrence of intercultural communication breakdowns, pragmatic failure, one of the heated topics of both pragmatics and its sub-discipline, inter-language pragmatics, has recently caught the attention of linguists and language teachers both at home and abroad.There have been quite a few researches done in this field on pragmatic transfer, the acquisition of target language pragmatic competence, and the influence of instruction on the acquisition of target language pragmatic competence in the past two decades with fruitful results. Many researchers have also touched upon pragmatic failure, which shows the common occurrence of pragmatic failure. Their findings are undoubtedly of great significance to foreign language teaching and learning, and will serve as a basis for further study in this field. But there still exist some problems: (1)The definition and classification of pragmatic failure is not clear; (2)The study has been mainly pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure in Thomas' terminology, which have their limitations because of its neglect of nonverbal communication; (3)More emphasis has been put on pragmatic failures at speech act level, lacking research on pragmatic failures at discourse level; (4)The research samples and materials are usually taken from oral communication, less work done on pragmatic failures in spoken discourse; (5)The way of collecting data (DCT) is problematic since it fails to observe the dynamic nature of communication, the negotiability of meaning, and the multifunction of speech acts; (6) The formerstudies are usually description of pragmatic failure. Much more work needed to be done on the causes of pragmatic failure.The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to make learners to be capable of communicating with people in the target language. Undeniably, identifying and minimizing pragmatic failure in EFL teaching is one of the prerequisites for successful intercultural communication on the part of students. The communication-oriented intercultural teaching is superior to the traditional way of knowledge impartation because the development and acquisition of intercultural communicative competence will certainly ensure the avoidance of intercultural pragmatic failure, or at least minimize the possibility of its occurrence. Therefore, it is urgent and absolutely necessary for us to carry out a systematic study on intercultural pragmatic failure, analyzing the pragmatic difference between Chinese and English culture and language use, so as to gain a deeper insight into the nature of pragmatic failure and have a better understanding of the cross-culturally pragmatic differences. Thus, it will make us more aware of the importance and urgency of developing learners' intercultural communicative competence.The thesis first attempts to review different definitions and delimitation of pragmatics and pragmatic failure, to redefine and reclassify pragmatic failure and delimit the domain of the present research. Then the author manages to classify cases of pragmatic failure collected from real life and classroom teaching through descriptive statistics, analyzing its social, cultural, and cognitive causes. The main causes for intercultural pragmatic failures are: inappropriate language input; difference in association, thinking patterns, culture, and pragmatic rules.The author aims to avoid the above-mentioned shortcomings of the previous studies, tries to...