A Study On The Pragmatic Failure Of Vocational College Students From The Perspective Of Adaptation

Pragmatic failure is one of the significant research topics of linguistics. At present, most linguistic researchers have devoted themselves to finding the causes of pragmatic failure from different perspectives, such as cross-cultural discrepancy, second language acquisition, cognition, etc. However, these research outcomes still hold a one-sided view on pragmatic failure and inevitably overlap with one another, thus their studies are not highly generalized and scientific. Besides, the students in the key institutes of high education become the main target of empirical researches for most of scholars, while the pragmatic competence of students in vocational colleges is hardly paid attention and touched. As the practical talents of the vocational colleges, it is of great importance to improve their pragmatic competence so that they can reduce pragmatic failure and achieve successful communication.In order to investigate the current situation of pragmatic competence of students in vocational colleges and study the relationship between the pragmatic competence and linguistic competence,142 English majors and 135 non-English majors of three grades in Ma Anshan Vocational College are randomly chosen as the subjects to do the research. The investigation is undergone in the form of questionnaire, and the subjects are grouped as six groups respectively. The relevant data of their pragmatic failure are collected and analyzed by the statistic software of Excel 2003 and SPSS 13.0. The results show that the pragmatic competence of the subjects is still in the low level on the whole. Although the pragmatic competence of English majors is a little higher than that of non-English majors, the differences of average pragmatic failure rate among the three grades of English majors and non-English majors are not very remarkable, which indicates that students'pragmatic competence does not go together with their linguistic competence.Based on the pragmatic failure committed by the students in the questionnaire, the author adopts Verschueren's Adaptation Theory as its theoretical framework together with the Context Theory and Style Theory as the supplements to analyze the causes of the pragmatic failure committed by vocational college students. The author concludes that the pragmatic failure results from the language users' neglects of both contextual and structural correlates adaptability. In the process of communication, when the interlocutor fails to adapt to the interpreter's mental world, social world and physical world, and fails to make the adaptation to the context and linguistic structure in the choice-making of language, the pragmatic failure will occur. Therefore, in the specific communicative process, the interlocutors should make dynamic adaptation to the communicative context and linguistic context, and choose the appropriate style of speech as well as correct linguistic form so as to avoid the pragmatic failure. Whether a round of interaction is successful is determined by whether interlocutors take an adaptive attitude towards these factors of communicative context.According to these findings, this study offers some tentative suggestions for the foreign language teaching, such as providing authentic teaching materials, teaching language in the context, integrating style knowledge in the teaching process, integrating language teaching with culture, teaching pragmatic principles for students and improving the present test. The author hopes that this tentative investigation of pragmatic failure of vocational college students will help English learners improve their pragmatic awareness so as to avoid pragmatic failure and communication breakdown in the inter-cultural communication.