An Analysis Of Intercultural Pragmatic Failure And Its Implications For College English Language Teaching

With the development of science and technology, the communication between different cultures becomes more and more frequent. English, as a global language, is widely used in today's world. The traditional way of English language learning and teaching in the past decades was focused on the language knowledge and skills. That results in the low English language competence. Since the communicative language teaching is popular recently, the communicative competence has been paid much attention to, but still little attention has been paid to the close relationship between language and culture. The college students' intercultural communicative competence is far from satisfaction, and pragmatic failure often occurs in intercultural communication.Language, culture, and communication influence each other. Cultural differences are the basic causes of pragmatic failure in intercultural communication. Culture is the inner core of language. The culture information carried by language is the premise of correctly using language. Cooperative principle and politeness principle can be used to explain the phenomena of pragmatic failure in intercultural communication. Cooperative principle contains the general rules that "make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged". It includes four categories of maxims: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. The politeness principle is originated from the cooperative principle. It is proposed on the individual acceptability in different cultures, and it embodies the respect to the other's feeling, condition, culture, custom, and habit.Pragmatic failure refers to the communicative failure caused by the two parties of communication misunderstand or inappropriately express verbal or nonverbal information, because of the lack of the competence of correctly understanding communicative information or efficiently using language in communication. Pragmatic failure is a serious problem in intercultural communication, because the person, who can speak the target language smoothly but inappropriately, may be regarded as behaving badly, and may offend others, which is worse than speaking badly. Pragmatic failure can be classified into three kinds: pragmalinguistic failure, sociopragmatic failure, and pragmanonverbal failure. Pragmalinguistic failure is related to the inappropriate expression of language, or misunderstanding of the other's utterance. It is related to the language itself; sociopragmatic failure refers to the misunderstanding caused by different cultures, or caused by the social conditions placed on language in use; and pragmanonverbal failure is the inappropriate nonverbal behaviour in communication.Pragmalinguistic failure can be analyzed from the following four aspects: abusing the expression of target language by using the native thinking way; not understanding the implicature of what the speaker said; violating cooperative principle; and violating politeness principle. Sociopramatic failure usually happens in greeting, addressing, compliment, thanks, invitation, consideration, apology, modesty, request, and farewell. Pragmanonverbal failure is not caused by what or how people say, but by their. nonverbal behaviors, which are known as kinesics, proxemics, paralanguage, and different concepts of time in different cultures.Avoiding or decreasing pragmatic failure in intercultural communication can be achieved by language teaching. It is necessary to cultivating learners' intercultural communicative competence. With the rapid development of transportation and communication, the improvement of science and technology, and the innovation of teaching approaches and methods, it is feasible to improve learners' intercultural communicative competence. Some suggestions are proposed. The stipulators of college English syllabus should give part of their attention to the importance of cultures while paying attention to English language knowledge, and it is better to add pragmatic knowledge to college English syllabus. For the English textbook compilers, paying much more attention to the differences between the cultures, and avoiding pragmatic failure in textbooks can help students learn better. In order to cultivate students' awareness and competence in intercultural communication, college English language teachers should change teaching ideas and better their teaching approaches and methods. Also it is beneficial to help students to perceive and appreciate their native culture.