Cultivating The Culture Awareness Of Non-English Majors From A Perspective Of Pragmatic Failure

The rapid development of modern communication technology and economic globalization has provided college students with even more opportunities and channels to communicate with English native speakers. Influenced by traditional teaching approaches and education systems, however, college English teaching in China lays emphasis on linguistic forms of the language, such as pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, rather than on the competence to use the language, let alone to use it properly in cross-cultural communication. Consequently, many college students, especially non-English majors, feel frustrated in their repeated pragmatic failures owing to lack of culture awareness. Their unsuccessful and unsatisfactory performance in cross-cultural communication somewhat proves the failure of years of traditional English education.Under such circumstances this thesis aims to study the ways and manners of cultivating culture awareness of college non-English majors in college English teaching. With a focus on examining factors that contribute to students'pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication, this thesis carries out an empirical study including language proficiency test, questionnaires and interviews. All the relevant data are then collected and analyzed, and their implications in classroom teaching are discussed. This study is undertaken with an aim of improving students'cross-cultural communicative competence.The theoretical framework of the thesis is based on Jenny Thomas (1983)."Pragmatic failure", in Thomas's opinion, occurs when the meaning the speaker wants the hearer to understand deviates from what the hearer really understands. It will cause misunderstanding between native speakers and foreign language learners, thus blocks the smooth progress of communication, and, in a worse case, may lead to a tension of interpersonal relationship.Thomas classifies two different kinds of pragmatic failures: pragma-linguistic failure and socio-pragmatic failure. The former is closely related to the negative influence of one's mother tongue on the target language, which is termed"negative transfer", while the latter correlates closely with culture differences, psychological factors of language learners and language teaching process.Based on the theories of Thomas and other researchers, this thesis establishes its own framework to analyze pragmatic failure, namely, from the perspective of combining pragmatics with culture, and analyzes a variety of pragmatic failures. Factors that lead to pragmatic failures include culture differences, ignorance of cultural contexts, lack of relevant knowledge of linguistics, as well as linguistic negative transfer. To identify how these factors work in the cross-cultural communications, the thesis writer designed and employed some research instruments such as language proficiency test, socio-cultural questionnaires and interviews (see appendixes). Based on data collected, the thesis writer advanced some suggestions of specific countermeasures to circumvent future occurrences of pragmatic failures. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of culture teaching centered by three factors--methodology, teachers and learners--were confirmed to avoid pragmatic failures and improve language learners'cross-cultural communicative competence.The study undergoes the following procedures.The writer first randomly chose 100 freshmen from the Department of Automotive Engineering in Shandong Jiaotong University as research subjects to conduct a language proficiency test, after which the participants were divided into two groups according to their scores: High-level Group and Low-level Group with each group 10 students. A socio-cultural test (designed by the writer) was then followed to test the students from the two groups separately. The statistics shows that a high language proficiency does not necessarily promise a high cross-cultural communicative competence. At the same time, the results of the socio-cultural test to the 20 students were kept as pre-test results. Then the writer proceeded to conduct a socio-cultural test by Wang Zhenya ( Changes were made based on real situations) to investigate the same 100 students and made some analysis and discussions from the view point of non-verbal, verbal behavior and big"C"culture, aiming at figuring out the current situation and causes of pragmatic failure produced by college non-English majors. Considering the completion and objectiveness of the study, the writer furthermore randomly chose 10 college English teachers teaching non-English majors and conducted the same socio-cultural test to them. Data collected indicates that the cross-cultural communicative competence of college English teachers needs to be improved urgently and they themselves lack seriously in culture awareness, which altogether has become one of the most important reasons for pragmatic failure by college students.The findings prove that most pragmatic failures are caused by ignorance of pragmatic principles and target culture. It is, therefore, urgent to integrate culture into English language teaching. For this reason, the writer organizes the 20 students (from high-level and low-level groups with pre-test results) into one experimental class, and conducts a fifteen-week experiment of culture teaching approaches. At the end the fifteen-week experimental teaching, another test is conducted to them and the result is kept as post-test result. The same test is conducted then among another 20 students as a control class. A comparison then can be made between the results from the experimental class and control class. The final finding is that only through adequate input of culture into college English teaching and enhancing the cultivation of culture awareness, can non-English majors reduce pragmatic failures and improve their cross-cultural communicative competence. In the end, some implications of the study for the improvement of college English teaching are advocated and the limitations are put forward as well.