Pragmatic Failures In Intercultural Communication: Their Root And Implications For TEFL

Nowadays pragmatic failure in intercultural communication has become an important field of pragmatics. Pragmatic failure occurs whenever the communicators could not use language appropriately or interpret language correctly. It is an important source of intercultural communication breakdown.Since Jenny Thomas put forward the notion of pragmatic failure in 1983, scholars began to study it from different perspectives. This dissertation attempts to discuss pragmatic failures from the viewpoint of culture and pragmatics. It tries to reveal the root of pragmatic failures and offers some suggestions for TEFL in order to find effective ways to avoid and remedy pragmatic failures in teaching.This paper begins with defining the terms like culture, communication and intercultural communication and characteristics of them. In intercultural communication, cultural interference is inevitable as long as there exist cultural differences, which will eventually result in pragmatic failures. This means what is particularly relevant to miscommunication is the link pragmatics makes between the ways that communicative behavior is performed and the ongoing understandings of the behavior by the people in interaction.In mis thesis, some influential theories of pragmatics are introduced to make sense of communication and communication breakdowns. There are two types of pragmatic failures: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Pragmalinguistic failure is the inappropriate transfer of speech act strategies from source language to target language. Sociopragmatic failure is far more delicate and involves system of psychology, value and knowledge of language and cannot be corrected directly. Thus this thesis will focus on sociopragmatic failure and give a detailed analysis of the root of sociopragmatic failures from three aspects: psychology, culture and teaching.Finally, aiming at facilitating EFL teachers' classroom work in dealing with pragmatic failure, this thesis provides some concrete teaching methods for TEFL.