A Study Of Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failures By English Majors In Local Colleges

Pragmatic failure remains a significant research topic of linguistics. In order to communicate with people from different cultures successfully, English learners need the competence of correctness and appropriateness. Students'cross-cultural pragmatic competence becomes one of the ultimate goals of English major teaching. However, in the cross-cultural communication, English majors still make this or that kind of pragmatic failures. Their pragmatic competence does not develop with the increasing of their vocabulary and grammatical knowledge.Pragmatic failure was first proposed in 1983 by Jenny Thomas as"inability to understand what is meant by what is said". She classified pragmatic failure into two types: pragmalinguistic failure and socio-pragmatic failure. Pragmatic failure is a problematic issue since it tends to cause misunderstanding even hatred between native speakers and Chinese students.In recent years, lots of researches have been done on the definitions, reasons and countermeasures of pragmatic failures, and great achievements have been acquired. However, this is merely the situation in the key institutes of higher education. As to numerous local colleges, the situation is quite different. Compared with the key institutes, local colleges hold no advantage of qualified teachers, high-quality students and advanced teaching facilities. They gain less attention from the educational departments of the state, too. Despite of all these disadvantages, the local colleges have the duty and task of cultivating qualified foreign language talents, especially for small cities. Therefore, it is necessary to study English majors'pragmatic competence in local colleges in order to bring about a great advance in teaching standard.With this intention, the author chooses three local colleges in Shandong Province: Ji'ning College, Weifang College and Heze College to do the research. The study adopts the research method of distributing test papers to students and making a small-scale interview of teachers and students. The test paper consists of two parts, 40 questions. The author selected 194 English majors at random in first-year and third-year grades in order to make a comparison between them. 182 test papers are available. The test paper is used to analyze the situation of pragmatic failures committed by English majors, and the interview is added to find out more useful information.The author puts forward 3 research questions at the beginning of the study:1. What is the present situation of English majors'cross-cultural pragmatic competence?2. Does learners'pragmatic competence positively correlate with their language competence?3. What pragmatic failures are English majors prone to invite in cross-cultural communication?All the questions are answered at the end of the study. The author finds: (1) English majors'cross-cultural pragmatic competence is not satisfactory on the whole, no matter what grade they are in; (2) English majors'pragmatic competence does not grow together with their linguistic competence, and there is no direct correlation between students'language competence and pragmatic competence; (3) English majors are prone to invite 12 kinds of pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication; Their acquaintance with pragmatic competence is neither systematic nor adequate. Therefore, they still have a long way to go to have systematic acquaintance with pragmatic competence under the direction of teachers.Based on the findings, the author puts forward some tentative suggestions for improving English majors'pragmatic competence as pedagogical implications of the study. The suggestions are given from five perspectives, namely cultural syllabus design; developing culture courses; enriching the main content of textbooks; teaching methods and techniques of culture input and tests, etc.As a conclusion, by using cross-cultural communication theories and pragmatic theories as theoretical basis, this study investigates the present situation of English majors'pragmatic competence in local colleges, probes into the relationship between culture study and pragmatic competence, and emphasizes on the necessity and strategies of cultivating English majors'cross-cultural pragmatic competence.