A Study On Foreign Students’ Pragmatic Failure In Daily Communication From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The ultimate goal of teaching Chinese as a second language is to develop the communicative competence of overseas students to speak Chinese decently and fluently, among which the pragmatic competence is the key for the overseas students to a successful communication in Chinese. Only by mastering a variety of pragmatic rules of Chinese can the overseas students reduce and avoid the pragmatic failure in daily communication, thus improving their language abilities. Analyzing the pragmatic failure form the perspective of adaptation theory can combine the cognitive, social and cultural aspects and help overseas students better grasp communicative norms in the Chinese cultural context and better understand the cultural psychology of the Chinese people, thus helping them to improve their Chinese communicative competence.The thesis conducts an investigation on overseas students’pragmatic competence in their daily communication in Chinese and analyzes their pragmatic failure based on Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory. The first chapter discusses mainly about the purpose and significance of this study, explores the necessity of studying the pragmatic failure of the foreign students, and makes an overview of the related study at home and abroad. Chapter Two focuses on the theoretical basis of this study, which is Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory. Chapter Three of this paper is an investigation on the foreign students’pragmatic competence in their daily communication in Chinese and explores their levels of pragmatic competence. Chapter Four analyzes the foreign students’ pragmatic failure in Chinese from the perspective of language users, the social world, the physical world and the psychological world. Chapter Five puts forward some suggestions on how to help overseas students to reduce and avoid pragmatic failure in Chinese respectively from the perspective of language acquisition and language teaching. As a part of the epilogue of this study, the last part makes a summary of the thesis and points out the limitation of the study.Through research, the thesis draws a conclusion that foreign students’pragmatic failure is attributed to their ignorance of adapting to the various elements of the communicative contexts dynamically in the process of communication. To reduce and evade pragmatic failure on one hand students should develop their pragmatic awareness and improve their empathic ability in the process of learning Chinese, and on the other hand, Chinese teachers should cultivate students’ Chinese pragmatic competence and intercultural communicative competence in the process of teaching Chinese.