An Empirical Study On Sociopragmatic Failures Committed By Non-English Majors

As the international communication is increasing foreign language is become more and more important. Foreign language can not only exchange information but also maintain the relationships between people. Pragmatic failure refers to the mistake the speaker committed by not using the language properly or not expressing in convention. Pragmatic failure is always consider bad and can not accepted by native speakers. It causes breakdown in communication.Pragmatic failure can be divided into two types: one is pragmalinguistic failure, the other is sociopragmatic failure. pragmalinguistic failure refers to the failure that caused by foreign language learner by using language structures which are different from what native language speakers use to express the same pragmatic function. Sociopragmatic failure refers to the failure that foreign language learners committed by lack of cultural background.Sociopragmatic failure is caused by cultural difference. For instance, Politeness, face, value system, and non-verbal communication and so on.different cultural backgrounds lead to different emphasis of those aspects. Foreign language learners always lack of cultural knowledge of the target language. There are a lot of researches on pragmatic failure have done by lots of experts in our country and overseas. However, the researches on sociopragmatic failure is very rare, especially sociopragmatic failure of college students of non-English major.The paper will focus on sociopragmatic failure. The writer has done experiment with two classes which contain 74 college students in Teaching Technology and Media Department in Shanxi Teachers'University to improve their sociopragmatic competence. The two classes have got the approximate marks in their College Entrance'Examination. The sociopragmatic competence of the two classes is lower than we considered according to the preceding test.Then the writer makes one class to be the control group and the other is the experimental group. The experiment of the culture teaching lasted for one school term. In the process of teaching, the teacher pays attention to the input of the culture. The teacher also arouses students'attention and comparison to the cultural difference in order to improve students'sociopragmatic competence and reduce their sociopragmatic failure. After the term, the two groups have got the final tests, the experiment group has got higher marks than the control group by analyzing the data of the tests. The pragmatic competence of the experiment group is obviously better than the control group. And the experiment group seemed to commit fewer pragmatic failures.At last, the writer gives some suggestions on how to improve pragmatic competence of college students of non-English major. In the writer'opinion, there should be some changes in textbooks, tests college English teachers and students themselves. In class, students should be made to contact with the target language as more as possible. They can talk with the native speakers. After class, they are asked to read more books about the knowledge of culture and society, read more news and see more films. On the aspect of English teacher, they should combine language teaching and culture teaching together. They should obtain cultural knowledge of the target language as well as their mother tongue and develop the ability to play different roles in class. The essay is not only give great help to university students who are not major in English, but also foreign language teaching and learning in university...