Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure And Its Implications For FLT

Cross-cultural communication, as the term indicates, requires that the language usersacquire a good command of, in addition to the adequate knowledge of the target language,the necessary pragmatic competence concerning the language. However, in the past fewdecades, mainly under the influence of structuralism, English teaching in China ignored,more or less, the cultivation of pragmatic competence and thus, incongruously, attributedcommunicative breakdown to inadequate knowledge of the English language alone. As aresult, despite a good mastery of linguistic form and regulations, many Chinese learners ofEnglish fail to use the language appropriately or interpret it correctly. The phenomenon, inthis thesis, is referred to as pragmatic failure. Pragmatic failure is a problematic issue sinceit tends to cause misunderstanding and even hatred between native speakers and Chineselearners. Undeniably, identifying and minimizing pragmatic failure in FLT is one of theprerequisites for successful cross-cultural communication on the part of language learners.The communication-oriented cross-cultural teaching is superior to the traditional way oflinguistic impartation because the acquisition of cross-cultural communicative andpragmatic competence will undoubtedly ensure the avoidance of pragmatic failure.Therefore, it is urgent and absolutely significant for us to carry out a comprehensiveresearch on cross-cultural pragmatic failure, analyzing the pragmatic and culturaldifferences in the use of Chinese and English so as to gain a deeper insight of thecross-cultural pragmatic differences and benefit the cultivation of learners' cross-culturalcommunicative competence.Recently, there have been quite a few researches done in this field with fruitful resultson the basis of the research of J. Thomas. The results of these researches have provideduseful information for foreign language teaching, and more and more people haveacknowledged the existence of pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication. Yet, sofar less attention has been paid to the comprehensive and systematic study of Chinesestudents' cross-cultural pragmatic failure in English learning. With researchers' increasinginterest in pragmatics, the author of this thesis firmly believes that, to help English teachersto become well-grounded in identifying and minimizing students' pragmatic failure incross-cultural communication, it is necessary to conduct a detailed and thoroughgoing studyof pragmatic failure instead of making superficial descriptions of isolated cases of pragmaticfailure. Even the traditional definition and classification of pragmatic failure should bere-examined.This thesis is firstly designed to investigate how well Chinese students have developedtheir cross-cultural pragmatic competence and what kind of pragmatic failure Chinesestudents are prone to invite in cross-cultural communication. For this purpose a survey was conducted in the non-English major's classroom. The results of the survey reveal thatstudents' pragmatic competence does not necessarily develop together with their linguisticcompetence if the teachers do not purposely instruct them on how to use the language in across-cultural context. So there is great room for College English teaching to improvestudents' pragmatic competence.To further cultivate the students' pragmatic competence, the previous researches ofcross-cultural pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure abroad and at home are carefullyreviewed.With the reflection on the previous study of pragmatic failure, combined with thepractice of developing students' pragmatic competence in the author's language teachingclass, the author of this thesis attempts to redefine cross-cultural pragmatic failure andrenew the classification of pragmatic failure. It's found that the traditional definitions andclassifications of pragmatic failure are a bit problematic since, firstly, it is unfair to imputepragmatic failure either to speaker or to hearer and, secondly, the traditional definitions andclassification seem to put much stress on verbal communication while little attention hasbeen paid to non-verbal communication which is now widely considered as an integral partof communication, and finally even though most researchers took social factors into accountin defining and classifying pragmatic failure, the psychological and cognitive factors arebeing ignored. Consequently, in this thesis, the author attempts to define pragmatic failureas "the communicative failure committed in the process of interpreting or expressingutterances (both verbal and non-verbal) due to the lack of the capability of accurateinterpretation or of effective use of language on different occasions with the participants'psychological states involved." And subsequently, enlightened by Thomas' classification ofpragmatic failure and the redefined pragmatic failure, pragmatic failure, from the author'spoint of view, is reclassified into four groups: pragma-linguistic failure, socio-pragmaticfailure, pragma-behaviorial failure and psycho-pragmatic failure, to be followed by acomprehensive study of the reclassified four kinds of cross-cultural pragmatic failures.Based on the new definition and classification of pragmatic failure, the main potentialcauses of pragmatic failure have been explored after a comprehensive study of the fourkinds of pragmatic failures. In the light of the causes of pragmatic failure, this thesisprovides some preliminary suggestions and practicable remedies for pragmatic competencecultivation, aiming at offering some references for English teachers and giving sometheoretical support for the shift from traditional teaching to culture-centered languageteaching so as to develop students' cultural awareness and pragmatic competence inlanguage use and to minimize the possibility of pragmatic failure in cross-culturalcommunication..