An Analysis Of Pragmatic Difference And Failure In Chinese And English

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. In order to accomplish communication, English speakers need not only the basic knowledge of English language, but pragmatic competence. Obviously, the duty of the English teachers is to cultivate the students'communicative competence and regard it as the aim of English teaching. But English teaching in china, under the influence of structuralism in the past, paid less attention to pragmatic teaching and attribute pragmatic errors to insufficient knowledge of English language. Therefore, many English learners often spoke a fluent but inappropriate English because of pragmatic failure.Pragmatic failure is an academically hot issue in pragmatic and inter-cultural study at home and abroad. Pragmatic failure was first proposed by Thomas in 1983 to refer to the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. She thought pragmatic failures occur because the meaning the speaker wanted the hearer to understand deviates from what the hearer really understands. Pragmatic failures are harmful since they tend to cause misunderstanding even hatred between native speakers and Chinese learners, as a result, smooth communication is undermined and harmonious interpersonal relationship become tense. Research in this area is of significance for building up foreign language teaching and foreign language learners'pragmatic competence and competence of intercultural communication.The thesis takes Speech Act Theory, Principles of Conversation and Politeness Principle as theoretical framework and summarizes the literature concerning the research of pragmatic failure both at home and abroad, investigates what aspects the pragmatic differences and failures embody. By way of quantitative analysis and qualitative research, the author carried out a questionnaire test among three groups: freshmen and graduate students in university and high school students of Grade One, to prove that students'pragmatic competence is in parallel with their language proficiency. However, the data collected in this research shows that the pragmatic competence of the language learners is far from satisfactory. Then the dissertation analyzes the causes of pragmatic failures from different perspectives of different cultural connotation, improper teaching, psychological source and ethnocentrism. At last some strategies are given to reduce and avoid pragmatic failures in order to facilitate people from different cultures to communicate successfully in intercultural communication.