An Investigation On Pragmatic Failure Of English Majors Based On Adaptation Theory

Pragmatic failure, which greatly influences people’s communication and the conveyance of information, is one of the significant topics for pragmatic research. Effective and appropriate communication can be a useful tool that helps us to solve problems. Meanwhile it also can deepen the understanding of each other and promote the interpersonal relationship. Moreover, it is connected with the people’s language quality in their daily life. Despite of the necessity and importance of proper communication, communicative failures of Chinese EFL learners occur inevitably in the process of communicating with English native speakers. By definition, a pragmatic failure results from the inability to understand what is meant from what is said.To investigate the current situation of pragmatic competence of English majors, the relation between pragmatic competence and linguistic competence, as well as the main cause of the pragmatic failures committed by the students, an empirical research is carried out. In this study 4 natural classes from two grades of English majors, altogether 125 students, are randomly selected as the subjects. It employs a questionnaire and an interview. In addition, the statistic software of Excel 2013 and SPSS 17.0 are also used. The investigative results show that the frequency of English majors’ pragmatic failure is in a high level as a whole, but the differences of average pragmatic failure rate between the two grades of English majors are very slight. It indicates that students’ pragmatic competence does not go together with their linguistic competence.On the basis of the pragmatic failures produced by the subjects in the survey, the author adopts a relatively new theory in the field of pragmatics, Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, as the theoretical foundation to do the further analysis and discussion from the angles of contextual correlations of adaptability and structural objects of adaptability. According to the rewriting answers provided by the subjects on the test papers and the information from the interviews, the author finds that the pragmatic failures of English majors mainly result from the failure to comply with Adaptation Theory, and the main types are failure to adapt to the contextual correlates adaptability and failure to adapt to the structural objects of adaptability.According to the results, some implications drawn from the findings of this study are discussed, and some tentative suggestions are given for future foreign language teaching and learning. The author hopes that this tentative study of pragmatic failures of English majors will help college English learners, especially English majors, to improve pragmatic awareness and develop pragmatic competence, so as to present both advanced linguistic competence and appropriate communicative skills in the process of communicating with native speakers.