A Study On Intercultural Pragmatic Failure And Its Implications For College English Teaching

With the development of science and technology, the communication and cooperation between nations becomes more and more frequent. English, as a global language, is playing an indispensable role in the modern society. The traditional way of linguistic studies in the past few decades has been focused on language itself, with little attention paid to the close relationship between language and society as well as culture. With the increasing development of intercultural communication between cultures and common occurrence of intercultural communication breakdowns, pragmatic failure, one of the heated topics of both pragmatics and its sub-discipline, inter-language pragmatics, has recently caught the attention of linguists and language teachers both at home and abroad.Intercultural pragmatic failure has attracted much attention in the field of pragmatics and applied linguistics. The term "pragmatic failure" is adopted from the article by J.Thomas (1983). She states that pragmatic failure refers to the inability to understand "What is meant by what is said". The author of the thesis intends to make a comprehensive study on pragmatic failure from lexical, discourse, and speech act, cultural differences levels. The purpose is to find out underlying causes for pragmatic failure and ways to improve students' pragmatic competence, and thus achieve the goals of English Teaching.The thesis first attempts to review different definitions and delimitation of pragmatic failure, then the author manages to classify the cases of pragmatic failures collected from real life, analyzing its social, cultural, and cognitive causes. The main causes for intercultural pragmatic failures are: inappropriate language input, difference in association, thinking patterns, culture, and pragmatic rules.The author thinks that study of pragmatic failure should include not only verbal communication but non-verbal communication as well. After investigating pragmatic failure at different levels, analyzing the root causes of pragmatic failure. The author of present thesis puts forwards some practical suggestions for college English classroom teaching: emphasizing intercultural communicative competence through awareness-raising, pragmatic act teaching, culture teaching in classroom, improving and adapting teaching materials. The author believes it is practical for college English teachers to make full use of the time in classroom teaching, trying to help learners to develop their intercultural communicative competence so as to minimize the possibility of or even avoid pragmatic failure in intercultural communication.