A Study Of The Effect Of Vagueness Theory On English Learning

Vagueness is an inherent property of natural language. It is universal and inevitable in communication. Since Eubulides in ancient Greek proposed the sorites paradox, which contained the idea of vagueness, vagueness of language has attracted more and more attention. After the publication of Fuzzy Sets by Zadeh in 1965, the ideas in fuzzy mathematics are applied to the study of vague language. This deepened people's knowledge of vague language enormously and inspired multi-dimensional researchers on vague language.However, up till now, most studies on vague language have been oriented towards the semantic and psychological-cognitive fields. Channell (2002) is the first person who analyzes vagueness from the angle of language teaching. But she only tries to analyze and describe some vague expressions in English language use. She doesn't propose a set of principles of how to utilize vagueness in second language learning and teaching.This thesis is an attempt at the study of vagueness and its application to language learning and teaching process from pragmatic angle and the effective results will be tested by statistical analysis. Firstly, it gives an introduction of vagueness theory and the significance of the research. Secondly, it surveys the theoretical study of vagueness and analyzes vagueness theory from the pragmatic aspect (vagueness and cooperative principle; vagueness and conversational implicature; vagueness and politeness principle, FTA theory). Thirdly, we believe that if learners can make full use of the vagueness in language, their pragmatic competence, especially communicative competence will be greatly improved. So we propose several vagueness principles in second language learning: the principles of Tolerance of Ambiguity; the principles of cognitive learning styles (combination of implicit and explicit learning styles; fuzzy memorizing strategy; inferring, guessing...