A Study Of Pragmatic Failure Of Daily Politeness Formulas Of College English Learners

The purpose of teaching and learning English is to develop students'communicative competence, while pragmatic competence is the key to successful communication. He Ziran, Yan Zhuang (1986), Huang Cidong (1984), Wang Dexing(1990) and Hong Gang(1991) made empirical studies on pragmatic failure of Chinese English learners in 1980s and 1990s. They give a lot of advice on how to avoid pragmatic failure and improve pragmatic competence. In the 21st century, what's the situation of pragmatic failure of college English learners? Are there any differences of their pragmatic failure from those studied by researchers mentioned above?This study is aiming to investigate pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure of college students when using daily politeness formulas to communicate. It first explores the overall level of pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure of college English learners. The second explores whether college English learners'linguistic proficiency influences their target language pragmatic competence? According to the result of the survey, pragmatic failure from the perspective of politeness will be discussed and the reasons for producing pragmatic failure and their implications to college English teaching will be analyzed.119 first-year non-English majors participated in the study. Three types of data were collected. They were: (1) scores on subjects'linguistic proficiency, (2) scores on subjects'pragmatic failure, and (3) subjects'choices of each item in the questionnaire. In order to explore whether college English learners'linguistic proficiency influences their target language pragmatic competence, the subjects were divided into two groups according to the scores on linguistic proficiency. All of these data were analyzed by Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) 10.0. Frequencies in descriptive statistics, an Independent-samples t-test and a Paired-samples t-test were used. Qualitative-analysis is also used to investigate what aspects of pragmatic failure the subjects are prone to produce and what causes their pragmatic failure.The major findings of the study are: (1) The rate of first-year non-English majors'pragmatic failure is very high. There is great room for students to raise their pragmatic competence. (2) Linguistic proficiency has a significant impact on the development of pragmatic competence of the first-year non-English majors. Both of their linguistic competence and pragmatic competence should be developed in English teaching. (3) Students still produce much high pragmatic failure in many aspects of speech acts in everyday conversation, such as response to apology, response to request, and response to inviting and offering. (4) The shortage of the knowledge of cultural differences and pragmatic theories is the main source of pragmatic failure and the inappropriate transfer of Chinese culture, language conventions and speech acts strategies is another important source. In addition, the lack of linguistic knowledge of English also leads to students'pragmatic failure.The above findings suggest that college English teachers should continue to foster students'pragmatic competence as well as linguistic competence from their first year, and much of their focus should be on developing students'pragmatic competence.