A Schematic Study Of Pragmatic Failure In Intercultural Communication

With the rapid development of globalization of economy and the frequentcontacts among different countries, people of different cultural backgroundscommunicate with each other more and more frequently than ever before. Beingdeeply influenced by their native culture backgrounds, people communicate with theirown cultural values, thinking patterns, communicative modes, and linguisticknowledge which gives rise to pragmatic failures. Jenny Thomas is the one who firstdefines pragmatic failure as “the inability to understand what is meant by what is said(1983:677).” and divides it into pragma-linguistic failure and socio-pragmatic failure.After that, a lot of linguists both abroad and at home have made various researchesfrom different perspectives. Since intercultural communication is an inevitable trend,research on pragmatic failure in intercultural communication has become a hot issueof both theoretical significance and practical value.Schema, the base of cognition, is one kind of cognitive structure which is formedfrom the basic analysis of the relationship between different items and also one kindof cognitive structure that people use for abstraction and conceptualization. Generallyspeaking, the process that people communicating with others is as to the interactiveprocess of exchanging between new information and the knowledge which alreadyexisted in the mind. At first, people get new input and then contrast it with the schemaalready stored in the mind. If the existed schema is inadequate for the new knowledge,people will adjust the existed schema accordingly. If there is no such schema in mind,people will restructure a new schema to for the future use.This thesis adopts an empirical study about EFL learners’ pragmatic failures inintercultural communication. It employs both quantitative and qualitativemethodologies. The quantitative research is a questionnaire with20multiple-choicequestions consisting of three parts. Part1includes11items which are directly relatedto the activities in real life intercultural communication, such as apologizing, greetingand so on. Part2, including7items, are about the idioms, proverbs which are goodreflections of both cultures; while Part3includes2items which are two examples of non-verbal communication. The qualitative research is a semi-open interview of thesubjects and their teachers which can help the author know the cognitive process ofthe subjects while doing the questionnaire and the teaching method their teachersadopts about improving the students’ intercultural communication competence.The theoretical significance of this dissertation is that it has adopted a cognitiveperspective of analyzing pragmatic failures in intercultural communication. Throughthe analysis of the result of the survey study, it finds that the occurrence of pragmaticfailures in intercultural communication is due to negative schema inference, schemadifference and schema deficiency. Also, this dissertation can enrich the application ofschema theory and lay foundations for further study of pragmatic failures inintercultural communication from other cognitive theories. At last, this thesis suppliessome valuable strategies for both EFL teachers and students to reduce or avoidpragmatic failures in intercultural communication. As for teachers, they should teachcultural knowledge, teach with schemata comparisons and teach in contexts. As forstudents, they should adjusting study attitude, update the schema storage frequentlyand broaden the general knowledge of both cultures.