A Survey On Pragmatic Failure Of Chinese English Majors From An Adaptation Perspective

Pragmatic failure remains a significant research topic. Since Jenny Thomas (1983) first put forward the term"pragmatic failure", scholars both at home and abroad have conducted researches into this area from different angles and their findings have laid foundation for further researches. In spite of the achievements, there are still several disadvantages in their studies. For example, most researches are conducted from the perspective of the speaker, without taking the hearer into consideration; the previous investigations mainly focus on the pragmatic failure in verbal communication and overlook that at the level of nonverbal communication; most empirical studies are confined to the survey of pragmatic failure committed by non-English majors without touching upon English majors.Therefore, the present study, conducted at two universities in Jinan, mainly examines the English majors'pragmatic failure in both verbal and nonverbal communication through questionnaire. There are altogether 231 subjects in this research including 137 English majors from Shandong Normal University and 94 from Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The results indicate that the average pragmatic competence of the subjects is still at a poor level. They commit pragmatic failure not only in verbal communication but also in nonverbal communication. Meanwhile, it proves our hypothesis that the pragmatic competence is in parallel with their language proficiency. Then based on the Adaptation Theory, this thesis aims to illustrate the main cause of pragmatic failure is that in the course of communication either the speaker or the hearer fails to adapt language or behavior to the communicative context, i.e. the language users, the mental world, the social world and the physical world.Besides an introduction and conclusion, this thesis consists of five chapters. The introduction provides a brief description of the background, the purpose, the significance and the layout of the thesis. Chapter One is literature review, which briefly goes over previous and current studies related to the present research and the topic of this thesis. Chapter Two is theoretical consideration. This part gives a brief description of the Adaptation Theory and explains why the Adaptation Theory is more appropriate than most of the traditional theories for pragmatic failure analysis. Chapter Three is about the methodology by which the investigation is conducted. In this part, the research questions, subjects, instruments, data collection, data analysis have been presented. Chapter Four is an adaptation-theoretic study of pragmatic failure. This section deals with the analysis and detailed discussion of the causes of pragmatic failure from the perspective of adaptation theory. Chapter Five is implications and suggestions. Based on the previous discussion, this part mainly puts forward some suggestions for avoiding pragmatic failure. At last, come the conclusion and limitations.Based on the qualitative and quantitative study, this study also suggests some pedagogical implication for English teaching and cross-cultural communication.