On Avoidance Of Pragmatic Failure From The Perspective Of The Adaptation Theory

Pragmatic failure, which has been one of the most important research topics in the fields of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, greatly influences the conveyance of information and the exchange among people. Therefore, in the process of improving students' language proficiency in college English teaching, teachers should pay more attention to students' pragmatic failure in their language use and enhance their pragmatic competence. This thesis attempts to evaluate the pragmatic competence of the college students and detect their pragmatic failure in communication. Furthermore, it provides suggestions to the avoidance of pragmatic failure in the framework of the Adaptation Theory.To measure the students' level of pragmatic competence, tests are given to the students. Based on the data collected through the pre-test, the author of the thesis gives rather comprehensive accounts of pragmatic failure. According to Verschueren, context includes the communicative context and the linguistic context. The communicative context refers to the language user's mental world, social world and physical world, while the linguistic context refers to the linguistic channel and the discourse formed by language itself. The author explains that when students fail to make adaptation to the communicative context and the linguistic context in the cross-cultural communication, pragmatic failure will be likely to occur, and communication breakdown may arise.Approaches to avoid pragmatic failure are put forward in the thesis, and the author uses a tentative concept, 'adaptation awareness', which can be understood as the degree of consciousness in language user's mind to make adaptation to the context of the target culture and to the pragmatic functions of the target language. The author tries to improve the students' pragmatic competence and their adaptation awareness to the English contextual correlates through covering social, cultural elements and the knowledge on pragmatic functions in the classroom teaching and activities. In order to test the efficiency of the methods, the post-test on the same subjects is carried out after one-semester's training. The findings of the research show clearly that the performance of the subjects in either group is improved a lot, which proves the feasibility of the methods. Besides, it also reveals that the level of the students' pragmatic competence doesn't totally depend on their language proficiency for the discrepancy of the statistics between the sophomores and the freshmen is not obvious.In a word, based on the Adaptation Theory, the thesis studies the problem of pragmatic failure in a detailed way, which is meaningful to the improvement of the students' pragmatic competence in communication and is of great significance to college English teaching.