An Empirical Study On Guides' Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failures

Cross-cultural communication is a set of communication activities conducted by people of different cultural backgrounds. Tourism has become an important industry undergoing rapid growth on a global scale. The development of the travel industry has, in turn, exerted a tremendous influence on the economy and cultures of the world. Tourism creates the need to communicate with people of various cultural backgrounds. As the soul of tourism, guides play important role in international tourism. However, pragmatic failures have frequently occurred among guides while rendering services to foreign tourists because of cultural differences. Therefore, we urgently demand to explore the nature of cross-cultural communication and seek the ways to avoid and eliminate pragmatic failures.This paper attempts to study the influences of guides' pragmatic failures on tourism and explore the reasons that cause guides' pragmatic failures through an investigation. The subjects of this research are two groups of 174 English tour guides in CQMIT, CCTS, COTS and CXITS. G1 consists of 93 English tour guides who are the less experienced tour guides, and G2 consists of 81 experienced English tour guides. A questionnaire was employed to collect the data for pragmatic failures. The theory used in this study is mainly based on Jenny Thomas'(1983) cross-cultural pragmatic failure theory. The finding proves that:1) Experienced guides have made quite fewer pragmatic failures than inexperienced guides.2) In tourism, guides are prone to have more sociopragmatic failures than pragmalinguistic failures.3) The reasons that cause pragmatic failures are closely related with guides' unfamiliarity with cultural differences between the native culture and target culture.Therefore, the author provides some preliminary suggestions on how to avoid and eliminate pragmatic failures for better cross-cultural communication.