Study On Pragmatic Failures Of Non-English Major University Students In Cross-cultural Communication

Language is a tool for human communication. With the rapid development of globalization, cross-cultural communication between Chinese and English is becoming more and more frequent. Nowadays the important goal of English learning is to improve cross-cultural communicative ability. However, the author of the present thesis notices that pragmatic failures often appear in university students’cross-cultural communication, which affects communicative effect seriously but is not paid enough attention to. The current researches on pragmatic failures in China are limited in aspects of research contents, questions and subjects. For example, the contents are focused on summaries of theoretical achievements made by western scholars; Research questions remain to be further studied; Certain groups of people, such as non-English majors, are rarely taken as subjects.Therefore, the author tries to make up for the deficiencies of those prior studies and carry out an empirical investigation of non-English majors’pragmatic failures. In the present study, three research questions are mainly put forward:What is the general situation and types of pragmatic failures committed by non-English major students in Nanjing Forestry University? What is the relation between linguistic proficiency and pragmatic competence? What is the influence of English cultural and pragmatic knowledge teaching on the development of pragmatic competence?The present study establishes a theoretical framework to analyze pragmatic failures based on the integration of theories in pragmatics, cross-cultural communication and second language acquisition. On the basis of pragmatic failure theory put forward by Thomas, theories such as Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, Speech Act Theory, Pragmatic Transfer, Culture Transfer, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and approaches of qualitative and quantitative analysis are adopted in the research.100non-English major students from Nanjing Forestry University are selected as subjects. Firstly, questionnaire one is employed to test the overall situation of pragmatic competence of the subjects. Then interviews are made to explore the possible causes of pragmatic failures. Afterwards, the experimental class are given10periods of pragmatic training. After the training, questionnaire two is adopted to test subjects’ pragmatic competence in order to find out the influence of pragmatic and cultural teaching on the development of pragmatic competence.Through the investigation, the following findings have been made:1) Non-English major students’ average pragmatic failure rate reaches up to35.2%. The pragmatic competence of these students remains to be further enhanced. Pragmatic failures often appear in sociopragmatic situations, such as addressing, greeting, inviting, etc.2) There is a positive relation between English proficiency and pragmatic competence. The students with a higher level of English proficiency tend to have a higher level of pragmatic competence. The failure rates of subjects with high-level, medium-level and low-level linguistic proficiency increase gradually from31.35%,35.8%to36.25%.3) After pragmatic training, the failure rate of the experimental class is lowered from34.95%to28.15%, which proves that pragmatic training is beneficial in reducing pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication and enhancing pragmatic competence. Based on the above findings, the possible contributive causes of pragmatic failures are further explored from the perspective of culture, second language acquisition and second language teaching. Besides, some pedagogical suggestions that would promote the development of students’ pragmatic competence are put forward. At last, the shortcomings and deficiencies of this study are summarized and suggestions for further research are provided.