A Study Of The Uses Of Vague Language And Its Implications To English Language Teaching

Edified by vague language, L.A. Zadeh, an American scholar, set up his Fuzzy Sets in 1965. The theory has been making important influence on linguistic studies since its establishment. Vague linguistics is a new branch which arose in the research of the application of"Fuzzy Sets". It has provided a new studying approach to linguistics. Vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon which ubiquitously exists in the communication of human languages and one of the intrinsic properties of natural languages, and of course there is also no exception about it in the English language teaching. So far more effort has been made on the theoretical study of vagueness in languages but quite less on that in language teaching. Generally speaking, influenced long by the Structuralism, we have overstressed linguistic forms and overlooked their pragmatic functions. And under the control of the traditional two-valued logic, it has been hard to find more effective teaching methods, which might have been one of the causes of the comparatively slow advancement in the English language teaching. The recognition of vagueness in languages and the role of pragmatic functions of vagueness seems to broaden our vision for the study of possible renewal of teaching concept and methodsThis work tries to probe vagueness in language teaching by analyzing it from the perspective of pragmatic functions of vagueness because of the connection with language teaching, explain those vague phenomena present in the English language teaching and their actual uses of vague language in communication and lay stress on the importance of following the vague principles in the English language teaching according to the vague features of English in teaching, and also discuss the importance and necessity of teaching the uses of vague language in English language teaching in the light of the teaching principles that the instruction of pragmatic knowledge must be taken as the focus and the development of pragmatic competence must be the purpose in foreign language teaching. Through a test of questionnaire about the pragmatic knowledge of vague language, we have known the present situation of the students'knowledge about pragmatic functions of vagueness and their awareness of using vague language. And through a comprehensive contrastive analysis of the students'results of the questionnaire and the results of their CET-4, we found that almost all the students who had some of the knowledge got higher marks while those who knew little got lower marks. This, in a sense, indicates that the knowledge of pragmatic functions of vagueness is of great help and promoting role in raising students'learning efficiency and the results in their studies. Thus having proved...