The Study Of Pragmatic Failure-A Schematic Approach

With the development of our society, the communication and cooperation between nations becomes more and more frequent. English, as a global language, is playing an indispensable role in the modern society. For many years, foreign language teaching has always focused on students' linguistic competence, such as grammar and vocabulary. Therefore, students' pragmatic competence does not develop with their linguistic competence. Many students can not use English to communicate with the native speakers of English appropriately. Pragmatic failure brings breakdown to communication; as a result, it severely holds back the communication between people. The study of pragmatic failure begins with Jenny Thomas. She first proposes the notion of pragmatic failure in her Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure in 1983. She classifies pragmatic failure into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. From that time on, many scholars at home and abroad have begun to contribute a great deal of efforts to the definition of pragmatic failure from different perspectives and analyze the causes of pragmatic failures. However, there are some defects in those researches. Most of the researches are confined to the study of cross-cultural pragmatic failure, neglecting the study of intra-cultural pragmatic failure; most researchers investigate pragmatic failures only from the perspective of the speaker, without taking the hearer into account; and moreover. The pragmatic failures studied are only those that take place in speech act level, while those that take place in intonation and discourse level are neglected.Schema theory in modern cognitive-psychology holds that people's knowledge is stored in long-term memory in the form of schema, which contains various fields of knowledge. The totality of schema is a person's whole knowledge. Schema is the base of cognition. People process any information of the world with the help of mental schema, which is used to explain, predict, organize and assimilate the new information. In English teaching and learning, we often find that students though have grasped a certain amount of pragmatic knowledge, they cannot express themselveswell, even misunderstand the others' intention. Schema theory will give us an explanation of this phenomenon: the two parties concerned in communication do not have proper schemata, or they lack the ability to activate their schemata; as a result, they cannot connect new language information with the mental schema and comprehend their counterpart's intention. Therefore, various kinds of pragmatic failures arise, and communication ends in failure. Based on schema theory, the author intends to describe pragmatic failures from phonological, lexical, syntactical, discourse, speech act, and pragmatic principle levels to make a comprehensive study of pragmatic failure. The purpose of the thesis is to find out ways of developing pragmatic competence according to schema theory, reduce instances of pragmatic failures, and thus achieve the goals of English teaching and learning.This dissertation is divided into 6 chapters:Chapter One serves as an introduction. It presents the current situation of English teaching and learning in China. It points out the fact that English learners have committed various pragmatic failures in communication and caused serious consequences. Then the author presents the theoretical base and the layout of the dissertation.Chapter Two is the literature review. It reviews the study of pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure in China and abroad. It points out their contribution and defects.Chapter Three serves as the theoretical bases. First, the author presents the definition of the two terms: cognition and metacognition. Then, the author introduces the definition of schema with reference to Carroll's information processing system, analyzes the relationship between long-term memory and schema in information processing system, and further explains the contents and principle involved in schema principle. Finally, the author narrates the important role that schema plays in language learning, for example, letter recognition, word, discourse and whole text comprehension.Chapter Four is the main chapter of this dissertation. The author conducts a comprehensive study on pragmatic failures. It is the schematic analysis from aphonological, lexical, syntactical, discourse level etc. The conclusion is that the lack of linguistic schema and content schema impedes communication between the two parties concerned, which is the root cause of pragmatic failures.Chapter Five tries to find out the implications of schema theory in English teaching. The author makes some tentative suggestions, such as finding measures to build and activate learners' cognitive schema from teachers and students' parts, developing learners' pragmatic competence from three respects: input, instruction and pragmatic awareness. Language learners should enlarge their branch schemata of language, such as intonation, lexicon, phrases, sentence structure, paragraph and discourse structure; meanwhile, broaden their knowledge scope in the following respects: human relationship, geography, habit, customs, etc.Chapter Six is the conclusion of the dissertation. The author summarizes the whole finding, limitation of this study and gives some suggestions for further research.