On The Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure Of Professional College Students

Pragmatic failure belongs to the field of pragmatics, a new branch of linguistics. Pragmatics studies how utterances have meaning in situation. Pragmatic failure refers to that the speaker fails to speak appropriately in a specific situation, or cannot use language accustomed to different situations, which leads to the hearer's misunderstanding of the speaker's intention. Cross-cultural pragmatic failure in this thesis mainly refers to the failure of the students in using English for communication.Linguists home and abroad have been doing researches on pragmatic failure for more than twenty years and so far the researches are rewarding for the fact that the experts have put forward some valuable viewpoints which are helpful to further understand pragmatic failure. In China, the systematic study of pragmatic failure is not as mature and Chinese linguists study it mainly from the perspective of cross-cultural communication and second language acquisition. Very few people study the pragmatic failure of the students from the perspective of ELT.This thesis aims to analyze the sources of the pragmatic failure of professional college students and the deficiencies in ELT in fostering students' pragmatic competence, and then try to find out some strategies to improve students' pragmatic competence. The research the author is doing here is meaningful to ELT for its shedding light on the strategies of helping the students acquire the pragmatic competence.In this research, Jenny Thomas' theory of categorizing pragmatic failure and the Kasper and Blum-Kulka's approach, miscommunication research, of studying pragmatic failure are applied.In the thesis, the data are collected by distributing two kinds of questionnaires -Questionnaire /and Questionnaire //-to 178 students in a professional college. The results of Questionnaire I indicate that lack of awareness of pragmatic appropriateness, the shortage of the knowledge of cultural differences, and the scarcity of the theories of pragmatics are the main sources of pragmatic failure of the students. The results of Questionnaire II show there are some deficiencies in ELT in fostering students' pragmatic competence: 1) Teachers seldom add the pragmatic appropriateness to the explanation of words, phrases, sentences and grammar. 2) Teachers pay less attention to the important role of culture and the proper ways of imparting cultural knowledge. 3) Teachers seldom introduce some relevant theories of pragmatics to students.Based on the sources of pragmatic failure and the deficiencies analyzed in this thesis, the author puts forward the following suggestions for ELT in professional colleges: 1) To highlight the appropriate use of words, phrases, sentences and grammar in classroom teaching. 2) To pay more attention to fostering the students' awareness of cultural difference and improving the improper ways to impart the cultural knowledge. 3) To introduce to the students some theories of pragmatics about verbal communication. 4) To pay more attention to improving teachers' own pragmatic knowledge and developing their pragmatic competence.