Pragmatic Failure In Intercultural Communication And English Language Teaching

With the swift development of the modern society and abundant interconnectedness of the world, people of different cultures have more and more opportunities to communicate with each other and have greatly benefited from the exchange of information. Meanwhile, a lot of problems concerning intercultural communication have arisen inevitably. Thus, how to solve these problems and controversies has become a hot topic. A lot of experts and scholars are paying more and more attention to them and some of them are working hard in this field. This thesis mainly focuses on the problem of politeness. Politeness Principle is widely used in every culture and the importance of each maxim varies in different cultures. These differences are formed under the longstanding influence of various factors such as society, history, anthropology and geography, etc. People of different cultures have different perceptions of what is considered as appropriate linguistic behavior. It is these different perceptions that lead to pragmatic failure. Moreover, pragmatic failure is one of the main factors that give rise to intercultural communication breakdown. After getting an overview of the analysis of the pragmatic failure, we can see that there are a lot of deficiency and inadequacy of the traditional English teaching: people are likely to make pragmatic mistakes when they only pay attention to vocabulary and sentence structures without paying attention to the appropriateness of the utterance. In the light of these shortcomings, this thesis first deals with the theories put forward by both foreign and Chinese scholars. Then it discusses the politeness phenomena. Finally, with the overview ofthe present English Language Teaching of "stressing grammar but ignoring the culture teaching", this thesis attempts to propose some measures to improve students' pragmatic competence and strengthen their intercultural communication ability.