An Analysis Of Intercultural Pragmatic Failure And Its Implications For EFL Teaching And Learning

With the development of society and economy, the communication andcooperation between nations becomes more and more frequent. In theprocess of cross-cultural communication, many people have experiencedculture shock and communication breakdowns, most of which are due tothe differences between language and culture. English, as an internationallanguage, is playing an indispensable role in the modern society. Thetraditional way of English language teaching and learning in China hasbeen focused on language knowledge, with little attention paid to the closerelationship between language and culture as well as the society. Therefore,how to develop the language learners’ communicative competence andpragmatic competence is the main task of foreign language teaching.The term “pragmatic failure” is adopted from the article by J. Thomas(1983). In her statement, pragmatic failure refers to the inability tounderstand “What is meant by what is said”. With the increasingdevelopment of international communication between cultures, pragmaticfailure has been one of the heated topics in the field of pragmatics andapplied linguistics and has recently caught the attention of linguists andlanguage teachers both at home and abroad.From the perspective of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication,the thesis first reviews different definitions of pragmatics and therelationship between pragmatics and intercultural communication so as toredefine and reclassify pragmatic failures and delimit the domain of thepresent research. Then the author probes into the causes of the pragmaticfailure from the following aspects as: language and culture differences,negative pragmatic transfer, different thinking patterns and speechbehavior, pragmatic principles and nonverbal communication. Throughanalyzing many phenomena and examples of pragmatic failures collectedfrom the real life and the author’s ten years teaching practice, the thesisfinally puts forwards some practical suggestions and implications forforeign language teaching, drawing the conclusion that foreign languageteaching should concentrate on improving the students’ interculturalcommunicative competence and pragmatic competence through the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness, reformation of traditionalteaching concepts and methods, and teacher’s self–improvement.This dissertation mainly deals with intercultural pragmatic failures inEnglish-Chinese context, including six chapters. Chapter one serves as anintroduction, presenting the background of this research, the objective andsignificance of the research. Chapter two provides an overview of thedefinition of pragmatics and the relationship between interculturalcommunication and pragmatic failure. Chapter three is the theoreticalframework of the thesis. Chapter four, the main body of the thesis,analyzes types of pragmatic failure and the causes of pragmatic failure.Chapter five proposes suggestions of avoiding pragmatic failure andimplications for foreign language teaching and learning. Chapter six is theconclusion of the thesis, stating the summary and limitations of theresearch and its’ future research areas.