Analysis And Countermeasures To Chinese Pragmatic Failures By Foreign Students Of Chinese In China

There are an increasing number of foreign students from varied cultural backgrounds learning Chinese in China for various reasons. However, cultural differences have a great impact on their learning of Chinese and their intercourse with Chinese native speakers in Chinese. Pragmatic failures, which are deeply rooted in culture, frequently occur in their communication in Chinese.Pragmatic failure consists of pragma-linguistic failure and socio-pragmatic failure. The former is language-specific, simply a problem of highly conventionalized usage. It occurs when language users misunderstand the connotations of words, misuse sentence structures and transfer pragmatic rules from the mother tongue to the target language. As a reflection of the deeper socio-cultural differences, the latter arises when the participants' relative power, taboo topics and social identity are involved. When a foreign speaker commits pragmatic failures with high linguistic proficiency, "a native speaker is likely to attribute his apparent impoliteness and unfriendliness, not to any linguistic deficiency, but to boorishness or ill-will." Hence, "pragmatic failure reflects badly on him as a person."(Thomas, 1983:26-30)In light of the cultural source of pragmatic failures, this paper discusses the causes of pragmatic failure mainly from the perspective of language-and-culture relationship and points out that cultural differences are the underlying causes of pragmatic failure. It combines the theory of intercultural communication with the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language and proposes several concrete countermeasures to pragmatic failure made by foreign students from the perspective of intercultural communication, aiming at providing some references for Chinese teachers and giving theoretical support for placing more emphasis on the culture-centered communicative teaching.