Pragmatic Failure And Spoken English Teaching

With the development of science and technology, the communication and cooperation between nations become more and more frequent. English, as a global language, is playing an indispensable role in this respect. In order to accomplish cross-cultural communication, English speakers need not only the basic knowledge of English language, but communicative competence as well. It is obvious that college students' communication competence should be treated as the goal of college English teaching. But research indicates that their communicative competence is not well developed with the length of time in which the learners learn English. Most students are not adaptive and cannot use English appropriately to communicate with the native speakers though they have a large vocabulary and a good command of rules of grammar. The students have various kinds of problems when they are encountering native speakers of English. This thesis mainly aims to deal with the problems encountered by English learners at college in their development of communicative competence and tries to find better ways to train their communicative competence in order to avoid pragmatic failure in their communicationPragmatics in teaching has become a major growth over the past decades. Pragmatic failure is an important source of cross-cultural communication breakdown. The term of cross-cultural pragmatic failure is adopted from the article by Thomas (1983). She states that pragmatic failure refers to the inability to understand "What is meant by what is said". Leech (1983) argues "the transfer of the norms of one community to another may well lead to pragmatic failure". In other words, pragmatic failure refers to communication breakdown resulting from being unable to realize a variety of pragmatic differences. Different from grammatical errors, pragmatic failure can be regarded as a fact that a non-English native speakers are being deliberately impolite, unfriendly, or even rude. Therefore, the study of cross-cultural pragmatic failure is of great value for both communication across languages and English teaching.In the process of this research, a questionnaire was designed and given. Toexplore the pragmatic failure and its causes, the questionnaire is a test on students' habits and ways of speaking in English culture.Data from this investigation reveals that in general the students' pragmatic competence is not adequately developed. They especially cannot use English properly under situations like greeting, congratulating, showing gratitude, apologizing, and showing politeness according to Leech's Politeness Principle. The result demonstrates that the students' weakness still lies in the wrong comprehension of context;being unaware of differences in pragmatic strategies after years' of the development of pragmatic research in teaching. All this suggests that pragmalinguistic knowledge and knowledge of sociopragmatics are the main trouble source in students' pragmatic failure. It has supported the point of view that cross-cultural pragmatic knowledge should be taught in class in some way or other.The research and writing are carried out in the following way: first, I begin with an introduction to the whole thesis in Chapter One. Chapter Two is an overview of the theories on pragmatics, which will serve as the research background for the whole thesis. And then, some examples of pragmatic failure in spoken English found in students' ordinary communication are to be analyzed. The focus of this thesis is on the analysis of the causes of pragmatic failure, which is dealt with in the third part. In the fourth part, I intend to discuss how to help Chinese teachers and learners of English to overcome pragmatic failures in spoken English teaching and learning in order to develop their communicative competence. The last chapter, Chapter Five, is a conclusion, which includes the main summary for the whole thesis and some indications of the significance and implication of this research.