Pragmatic Mistakes Compliance Research On College English Teaching

With the development of science and technology, the communication and cooperation between nations becomes more and more frequent. English, as a global language, is playing an indispensable role in the modern society, which makes great demands on not only good linguistic competence, but also high pragmatic competence, that is, to use the language in a proper way, and to be able to achieve one's communicative intention successfully.Jenny Thomas (1983:97) points out the serous consequences that a cross-cultural pragmatic failure may bring. "While a grammatical error may reveal a speaker to be a less than proficient language user, pragmatic failure reflects badly on him/her as a person." Therefore, she proposed the notion of pragmatic failure in 1983.With Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory as its theoretical framework, this thesis points out that the root cause of pragmatic failure is that in the course of communication either the utterer or the interpreter fails to adapt language to the communicative context, which is composed of language users, mental world, social world and physical world. At the process of communication, both sides of communication should make choice to adapt varieties of communicative context. Thus, adaptation is an effective way to avoid pragmatic failure in communication.After that, the author of present thesis puts forwards some practical suggestions for college English classroom teaching: emphasizing cross-cultural communicative competence through awareness-raising, integrating pragmatic competence into language teaching class and the teachers'self-development. The author believes it is practical for college English teachers to help learners to develop their communicative competence so as to minimize the possibility of or even avoid pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication.