Intercultural Pragmatic Failures In Business English Majors In Independent Colleges

With the increasing international communication, business trades among multiple countries are more and more frequent. As the most popular language in the world, English is revealed as a vital language for people from different cultures to communicate. Catering to the needs of developing intercultural business trades, Business English major has sprung up in colleges and universities in recent years, thus Business English teaching has developed fast as well. In order to conduct effective business trade across borders, English learners especially Business English learners are required to be equipped with not only good linguistic competence, but also pragmatic competence and communicative competence. However, does longer years of learning necessarily result in higher pragmatic competence and communicative competence? For after learning English for years, students still commit pragmatic failure due to inappropriate behaviors which disobey target cultures, for instance, utterances in improper time and place or inappropriate use of language which could result in communicative breakdown.However, the curriculum on Business English teaching is not so scientific in some colleges and universities, especially in those independent colleges which take a large part of responsibility in cultivating Business English talents as well, and the quality of their teaching needs to be improved. What’s more, the teachers’ teaching ability is far from qualified. During author’s teaching practice in independent colleges, she also notices that most students commit high ratio of pragmatic failure which would impede their communicative competence. Therefore, it is of great significance to study students’pragmatic failure in intercultural communication in independent schools and universities, and pose higher requirements for Business English teaching at the same time.Based on this, the present paper examines the causes of pragmatic failure through empirical study and attempts to put forward some implications for how to avoid or reduce pragmatic failures in intercultural communication.153undergraduate students are chosen from Huali College, Guangdong University of Technology as the subjects, and their intercultural pragmatic competence and the cultural learning conditions have been investigated through pragmatic competence test and questionnaires. In addition, interview has been made on60students from three grades at random. Based on the data collected, the present paper aims to investigate the current situation of students’pragmatic competence in independent schools, find ways to reduce or avoid pragmatic failure, and attempts to integrate related cultural contents into Business English teaching. This present paper adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods:the quantitative method is applied in the analysis of intercultural pragmatic competence test and questionnaire about culture learning, while the qualitative method is used in the analysis of interview.The results of this research can be summarized as follows:Business English majors in independent colleges commit high ratio of pragmatic failure, and pragmalinguistic failure is more popular than sociopragmatic failure and pragmabehavioral failure; the cultivation of students’pragmatic competence needs to be improved in independent colleges; longer years of learning does not bring about higher pragmatic competence, so integrating culture input into Business English teaching is necessary.