A Study On Pragmatic Failure In Cross-cultural Communication In The Teaching Of Chinese As A Foreign Language

In recent years,TCSL has been well developed.The theoretical research on teaching Chinese as a foreign language has also been continuously improved.There are more and more studies on phonetics teaching,vocabulary teaching,grammar teaching and pragmatic teaching.However,the study of pragmatic teaching is still been in theory and lacks factual basis.Pragmatic teaching has not received sufficient attention from the teachers who teach Chinese as a second language.With more and more foreigners learning Chinese,the demand for teachers of Chinese as a foreign language is increasing.The new era environment also puts forward higher requirements for the professional quality of teachers of Chinese as a foreign language.In addition to the teaching of language knowledge,how to improve foreign learners' communicative competence who are learning Chinese needs more attention from Chinese teachers.Based on Thomas' s theory of cross-cultural pragmatic failures,this article will summarize and analyze the junior high students' pragmatic failures in Xavier School.This paper also summarizes the reasons for these pragmatic failures,and aims at finding out that how to improve students' Chinese language ability and the ability to manage social interactions with Chinese.This paper is divided into six chapters:The first part is the introduction.The author mainly expounds the reason and significance of the selected topic,summarizes the research status,and puts forward the research methods.The author mainly adopted the dialogue method and the language comparison method to analyze the student's pragmatic failure.The second part mainly introduces the theory and research related to pragmatics and pragmatic failures,such as Speech Act Theory proposed by the British philosopher J.L.Austin,Thomas' cross-cultural pragmatic failure theory and the inter-lingual pragmatics theory proposed by American psycholinguist Selinker.In the third part,the author first introduced the teaching and research objects of the author's teaching school—the characteristics of middle school students in Xavier School.Then,based on Thomas' s "dichotomies",the author mainly analyzed the pragmatic linguistic failure often made by Xavier Junior High students,mainly including vocabulary and grammar.The author reached the following conclusion: Influenced by English and Filipino,Xavier Junior High students neglect the acquisition of contextual meaning when learning vocabulary meanings.They ignore the pragmatic problems in the acquisition of Chinese grammar.The student's pragmatic linguistic failure will directly affect students' Chinese language acquisition.The fourth part is still based on the dichotomy of Thomas,and analyzes the social pragmatic failures often made by junior high students in Xavier School.Firstly,the author analyzed the characteristics of social pragmatic failures.Then the author analyzed the students' speech acts based on their choices of pragmatic principles and applying English social methods.The author finds that: Firstly,in the process of using Chinese to communicate,Xavier Junior High students are not aware of the differences between different cultures when they follow the principles of cooperation,nor are they clear about the features of Chinese culture.Second,influenced by the English language and culture,students still apply the social methods in English culture when communicating in Chinese.The fifth part mainly analyzed the causes of students' cross-cultural pragmatic failures.There are many reasons for this,but the author mainly analyzes the subjective causes of students' cross-cultural pragmatic failures,the teaching errors of Chinese teachers in teaching practice and textbooks.The negative transfer of first language,the contradiction of cultural identity,and the restriction of language ability are subjective reasons for students.It is a mistake for teachers to ignore the pragmatic teaching and cultural teaching during the teaching process.In the sixth part,the author separately proposes strategies on how to reduce the students' pragmatic linguistic failures and how to reduce the students' social pragmatic failures.Firstly,in the classroom teaching,the pragmatic meanings,pragmatic conditions of the Chinese grammatical structures and pragmatic perlocution of Chinese word order aresupposed to be appropriately performed.At the time,it is also very helpful to reduce the students' pragmatic linguistic failures by combining teaching with contextual information teaching and optimizing the evaluation method and content.Secondly,in classroom teaching,Chinese teachers are supposed consciously to improve students' awareness of cross-cultural communication,properly by conducting comparisons between English and Chinese language and culture,and increasing the content of cultural teaching.These ways help to reduce students' social pragmatic failures.