A Study Of Chinese English Learners’ Pragmatic Failure From The Perspective Of Politeness Principle

As the frequently increasing cross-cultural communication, English plays a moreand more important role. In the traditional concept, linguistic competence was moreemphasized than pragmatic competence. Nowadays, People are increasingly realizingthe lack of pragmatic competence may lead to Pragmatic Failure which makescross-cultural communication cannot carry out successfully. Cultivating learners’communicative competence can make sure the cross-cultural communication gosmoothly.There are many reasons which can cause pragmatic failure, among whichpoliteness is a main reason. Politeness can help maintain a positive and harmonioussocial relationship. However, in the daily communication, people are oftenunconsciously influenced by the negative transfer of mother tongue and use theconventional polite model. But different culture has different act of politeness. Whatis polite in one culture might be impolite in another culture. Thus, it is quite necessaryto study the pragmatic failure from the perspective of politeness principle.This thesis studies the pragmatic failure of Chinese learners from the perspectiveof politeness principle and adopts an approach of questionnaire. There are fivechapters of the paper. The first chapter brief introduces the research background,purpose and significance of the pragmatic failure. The second chapter provides a briefreview of previous studies on pragmatic failure and politeness principle both at homeand abroad. The third chapter carries out a questionnaire which is consist of30multiple choices involving addressing form, greeting, thanking, compliments,requesting, apologizing and leave-taking and conducted by75students in LiaoningNormal University. The fourth chapter analyzes the statistics and results which iscollected from chapter three and provides some pedagogic implication and suggestion.The fifth chapter gives a short conclusion. Due to the lack of pragmatic competenceand cultural awareness, Chinese English learners are easy to commit pragmatic failure.Thus, it is necessary to enhance the pragmatic competence as well as linguisticcompetence and cultivate their cultural awareness.