On Teaching Design Of Complaints Based On The Contrastive Analysis Of Complaining

Academic researchers suggest that in China, English majors language proficiency has gradually improved over the past decades, especially in listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, in verbal communication with American native speakers, pragmatic failure does happen. The main reasons are as follows: 1) college students pay more attention to the acquisition of English language than to the pragmatic acquisition; 2)Universities in China lay emphasis more on language teaching than on pragmatic teaching.From the perspective of constructionism, and based on speech act theory, and pragmatic teaching framework,this paper makes a contrastive study of complaints and further explores its teaching to Chinese English majors.The paper adopts DCT as its research instrument in which 8 scenarios are identified on the basis of 4 social power and social distance combinations.The contrastive analysis of complaining strategy, lexical and syntactical device is made under these 4 combinations.This results shows that, when the interlocutors are close, and complainers have higher social status, the use of a mixed strategy in complainers distribution has a significant difference between American and Chinese students.However, except for that, there exists no significant differences between American and Chinese students in the frequency of complaining strategy, lexical and syntactical device. Although there is no statistically significant difference, through the line chart, we can still find that obvious differences in their uses. Therefore, the teaching of complaints should never neglect the above three dimensions. The teaching design content includes: the teaching goal, teaching content, teaching material, teaching means, teaching standard and pragmatic testing.This study is intended to improve the students’ pragmatic consciousness and their pragmatic competence,thus facilitating the students’ English proficiency. So while teaching English in general, teachers ought to stress the importance of pragmatical teaching in particular. To enable the students to understand that a grammatically correct sentence may be not appropriate for all situations. Students should achieve pragmatic competence in addition to grammatical knowledge.The present study has implications for Language teachers, second language learners and cross-cultural communicators. We need to lead the students to understand that the grammatically correct sentence may not be appropriate in any situations.We need to establish natural context in classrooms, guide the students to match the language forms with pragmatic functions, thus producing appropriate utterances. For second language learners,they need to pay attention to their systematic differences from native speakers, thus acquiring the culture competence behind the language and pragmatic knowledge. For cross-cultural communicators, to master the pragmatic rules behind the language system of both sides is vital to promote cross-cultural communication.The future research could be improved in the following three aspects.1)To further expand the corpus by employing more subjects.2)To add a variable of language proficiency, that is, including a group of English majors,so as to explore whether higher English level students’ pragmatic competence is much closer to that of native speakers.3)To make a longitudinal study of Chinese English majors, respectively investigating the same group of students at their second, third and fourth academic year, so as to explore their pragmatic competence development.But all of these ideas could not be completed in my master programme. It is hoped some of them may be done in the future research.