A Corpus-based Study Of Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failures In Chinese EFL Learners’ Writings

With the fast development of economics and technology, English has become a global language. As a form of written communication, English writing reflects EFL learners’ comprehensive English proficiency. However, the current English writing ability of Chinese college students is relatively weak. Furthermore, in the context of examination-oriented education in China, the teaching mode of English writing is single and the teaching methods are improper. Hence, cross-cultural pragmatic failures become widespread in EFL learners’ English writings. Accordingly, this study has great theoretical and practical significance.In the related professional literature, the majority of scholars in China and beyond mainly focused their attention on analyzing the cross-cultural pragmatic failures occurring in EFL learners’ daily communicative language through adopting the research methods of questionnaire survey, interview and contrastive pragmatic analysis and so on. In addition, the research materials of their studies were mainly restricted to some episodic dialogues and discourses. However, the studies which are based on English corpus and at the same time adopt the methods of text analysis to systematically explore the cross-cultural pragmatic failure in Chinese EFL learners’ writings are relatively less. Therefore, based on Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), this thesis intends to analyze the cross-cultural pragmatic failures in Chinese EFL learners’ writings.A corpus-based approach is adopted in this study. The author chose the compositions of CET-6 in the sub-corpus ST4 of CLEC as the research subjects. Based on the existing error tags in CLEC, the author used the corpus software AntConc3.2.1w to retrieve the selected error tags respectively, and then made a statistical analysis on the retrieved data. Furthermore, through an analysis of the retrieved concordance lines, the author explored the common types and causes of cross-cultural pragmatic failure.The study results suggested that though the majority of the speech errors in Chinese EFL learners’ compositions are grammatical mistakes, there also exists a certain proportion of cross-cultural pragmatic failures. Moreover, the common types of cross-cultural pragmatic failure are word-for-word translation, equating the word meaning of English and Chinese and transferring from mother tongue to target language. What’s more, through further analysis and discussion, the main causes of cross-cultural pragmatic failures are also explored which include the negative transfer of the mother tongue, cultural differences and teaching-related factors.Based on the research findings, the author provided some pedagogical suggestions for current English writing education. For example, EFL teachers can recommend some English reading materials, movies and journals to language learners, which will make students have more direct contact of western culture. Moreover, some courses that related to cultural background knowledge of the west should be set up and it is better to use a certain proportion of good textbooks that are published overseas. Thus, it can help EFL learners lay a comprehensive and systematic foundation of the cultural background knowledge of the west. Also, English teachers themselves should strive to improve their own cross-cultural awareness and combine the teaching of basic linguistic knowledge of language and cultural background knowledge together. Moreover, they should be good at finding, concluding and correcting learners’cross-cultural pragmatic failures occurring in their English writings. Hence, Chinese EFL learners’cross-cultural awareness will be improved gradually.