Suggestions on how to avoid pragmatic failure and develop students’ communicative competence25.doc

PAGE  PAGE 6 Suggestions on how to avoid pragmatic failure and develop students’ communicative competence Abstract: Pragmatic failure is the main source that gives rise to cross-cultural communication breakdown. For efficient communication and correct understanding, teachers should focus their attention on language in use and help the students raise their communicative ability. The author gives some suggestions on how to avoid pragmatic failure and develop students’ communicative competence. Key words: pragmatic failure;　communicative competence;　English teaching 1. Pragmatic Failure 1. 1 Definition of Pragmatic Failure Pragmatic failure was first put forward by Thomas (1983) to refer to the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. She notes that “pragmatic failure has occurred on any occasion on which H (the hearer) perceives the force of S’s (the speaker’s) utterance as other than S intended she or he should perceive it. After Thomas published her “Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure”, many scholars in China began to study this issue. Hu Wenzhong uses the term cultural mistakes to refer to language and behavior that is inappropriate or unacceptable to most native speakers, and he considers that cultural mistakes are often worse than linguistic ones and tend to create ill feeling between native speakers and Chinese speakers of English. He Ziran notes that pragmatic failure is those faults, which make the communication imperfect in verbal communication. 1. 2 Types of Pragmatic Failure According to Thomas, pragmatic failure can be divided into two types: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Pragmalinguistic failure occurs when the pragmatic force mapped by speakers on to a given utterance is systematically different from the force most frequently assigned to it by native speakers of the target language, or when speech act strategies are inappropriately transferred from L1 to L2. Sociopragmatic failure refers to the kind of mi