| The purpose for us to learn a language is to communicate. Usually, people have many believes about language. One important is that 'good' usage involves (among other things) clarity and precision. Hence, it is believed that vagueness, ambiguity, and imprecision as well as uncertainty are to be avoided. However, nowadays more and more people realize the ability to use strategies for being vague constitutes an important aspect of the communicative competence. Vagueness is the nature of language. The vagueness in language determines that one language form can mean differently, and different language form can express the same meaning. So it is up to language users to make choices in language using. This property of language brings some negative effects for language learning and communicating. There is another factor that also influences the language learning, that is the vagueness or uncertainty resulted by different cultures.We believe that if the students can make full use of the vagueness in language, their communicative competence will be greatly improved. So the vagueness principles are advanced here to guide language teaching, that is the principle of tolerance ambiguity and the principle of active selection. And teachers should try to cultivate the students' cognitive learning style of inference, guessing, and association. In this way the students' communicative competence of using L2 will be improved. |
