Study On Spoken English Teaching For Non-english Majors

It is very obvious that the development of science and technology, the communication and cooperation among countries are becoming more and more frequently. Being a global language, English is playing an indispensable role in the modern society. The traditional linguistic studies in the past few decades has been focused on language itself, with little attention paid to the close relationship between language and society as well as culture. With the increasing development of intercultural communication and common occurrence of cross-cultural communication breakdowns, pragmatic failure, one of the heated topics of both pragmatics and its sub-disciple, inter-language pragmatics, has recently caught the attention of linguists and language teachers both at home and abroad. Non-English majors are required to master the pragmatic competence as well as the basic knowledge of English language so as to accomplish communication. At the same time, college English teachers should develop the non-English majors’communicative competence and treats it as the goal of the spoken English teaching for non-English majors. While study points out that pragmatic competence does not necessarily develop with the length of time non-English majors study English in college. Varieties of phenomena of pragmatic failure arise in cross-cultural communication among non-English majors. They cannot put English in use to communicate with native speakers of English properly no matter how large vocabulary and good command of rules of grammar they have mastered.Cross-cultural pragmatic failure has been an important domain in the field of pragmatics and applied linguistics. The term "pragmatic failure" is adopted from the article by J. Thomas (1983). She states that pragmatic failure arise by the time that the speaker perceives discourse meaning and talk intended or believed to be the listener perceives different meaning. She also thinks the importance of pragmatic failure lies in the saying like this:while grammatical error may reveal a speaker to be a less proficient language-user, pragmatic failure reflects badly on him/her as a person.The author of the thesis is going to analyze the underlying causes for pragmatic failure and ways to improve non-English majors’ pragmatic competence applying Speech Theory and Principle of Conversation. And thus achieve the goals of English spoken teaching for non-English majors. In this paper, the theory of pragmatic principle was researched under Chinese-English cultural context and the aim is to investigate the inspiration for language teaching. The proper using and understanding of language is emphasized so as to avoid pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication. The paper first introduces the research background both at home and abroad and the importance for the non-majors’oral English teaching. Then is the introduction of some theory on pragmatics. Next is the analysis of pragmatic failure from the vocabulary、syntax、discourse、speech act and other aspects. The conclusion stresses that spoken English teaching for non-English majors should aim at improving learners’pragmatic competence. And teachers are also required to enhance their pragmatic awareness in order to meet the non-English majors’need.