How to Reduce the Pragmatic Failure of Chinese Learners in English Teaching
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Abstract:Communicating effectively with native English speakers is difficult for Chinese students. As Chinese culture is quite different from that of the English speaking countries, the rules for using Chinese naturally differ from those for using English. In real communication, the Chinese English learners tend to transfer their mother tongue references of language use to their english performance directly, which causes many misunderstanding and communication breakdown. This paper firstly states about the trouble sources of the pragmatic failure of Chinese learners in communication with English native speakers and then advances some teaching methods of improving learners’ pragmatic skills.
Key words:trouble sources pragmatic failure teaching methods pragmatic skills
I. Introduction
1.1 Language Use in Real Life vs. Traditional Teaching
The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to enable the students to use the foreign language in work or life when necessary.Thus what teachers should teach is what people use in the real world.
however, this is not always the case in the present day foreign language teaching practice in China.Very often there is a big gap between the use of language in real life and the traditional foreign language teaching.
1.2 Theoretical Consideration
In 1971, D.H. Hymes proposed "communicative competence".Fostering communicative competence is believed to be a possible way to solve the problems in traditional teaching pedagogy.This competence includes four aspects:
1)Knowing whether or not something is formally possible (grammatically acceptable), which is roughly equivalent to Chomsky's linguistic competence.
2)Knowing whether something is understandable to human beings.
3)Knowing whether something is in line with social norms.
4)Knowing whether or not something is in fact done: Do people actually use language this way? (王蔷,2000:16)。
As Chinese culture is quite different from that of the English speaking countries, the rules for using Chinese naturally differ from those for using English.Though most of the students have recognized this, they still tend to transfer their mother tongue references of language use to their English performance directly and fail to communicate with native speakers effectively.This phenomenon can be called "pragmatic failure", which was put forward by Thomas (1983:324). It refers to that the students can not understand the real meaning of what have been said.
In today's world, international communication is vital to a nation's politics, economy, military affairs, science, etc.So it is critical for teachers to find out effective ways to teach students pragmatic knowledge and to foster their communicative competence, which are just what we will discuss and study in this paper.
Ⅱ. Analysis about the Trouble Sources in Chinese Learners’ Pragmatic Failure
In this part, some of the examples about pragmatic differences between Chinese and English will be given to identify the trouble sources in Chinese learners’ pragmatic failure.According to the proposal of Thomas (1984:256-264)③, we define two types of pragmatic failure: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure.
2.1 Pragmalinguistic Failure
Pragmalinguistic failure refers to "the inappropriate transfer of speech act strategies from L1 to L2, or transferring from L1 to L2 expressions which are semantically or syntactically equivalent, but which have a different interpretive bias'".(严庄,何梓然,1998:234)④The following items belong to this genre.
Item1:In the dormitory, the four girls are discussing the plan for a spring outing.
Xiao Yan:“Did the weatherman say it was going to rain tomorrow?”
Xia Lin:
a. “Yes, he did.”
b. "Well, he did."
c. "Well, he didn't say it was going to rain tomorrow."
In English, words like "well, like, no" are a kind of conversational tool making the speakers keep on going.In the test, most of the students just choose a.They had no clear conception of the use of the initiator "well", a word which is used instead of "yes" or "no" when the speaker believe that his or her answer is not quite satisfactory to the hearer.So in the above example, the right answer includes all of the options.
Item2: Checking in at a hotel, a foreigner wants to book a room.The clerk does not hear it clearly.
Guest:“I want to have a separate room please.”
Clerk:a. “Could you speak more slowly?”
b. “Pardon me.”
c. “What?”
In Chinese, “shenme”(什么) is the most commonly used request for repetition and it is applicable to anyone, regardless of the relationship between the speaker and the hearer.Being contrary to Chinese, in English, the utterance of “What?” sounds like an order or imposition rather than a request.If a server says like this to the customer, his action would be regarded as rudeness.Many Chinese English learners chose c directly because they make a direct transference from the Chinese to English.
Item 2 is caused by the inappropriate transference of speech act strategies from Chinese to English.It is a frequent cause of pragmalinguistic failure.
2.2 Sociopragmatic Failure
Sociopragmatic failure mainly stems from students' different perception of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behavior in English and Chinese.This kind of cultural mistakes can be divided into three groups.
2.2.1 Culturally Unacceptable
Item 3:Nancy comes from America, she holds a party in her house.Now she is holding a coffee pot.She wants to treat her Chinese friend to some coffee.
Nancy: "Would you like some coffee?"
Xiao Zhang:a.“No, please don’t go to any trouble.”
b. “Yes, please.”
c.“Thank you.”
Some students choose the sentence “No, please don’t go any trouble.” as an appropriate response to the question “Would you like some coffee?” while the hostess is holding a coffee pot in her hand.In western culture, people will never regard offering coffee to their guests will go to any trouble, so this response would be a little ridiculous to the native English speakers, especially to those who know nothing about Chinese culture.Some other students choose "Thank you." as the response.This answer may make the offer be confused, because she does not know whether she should pour coffee or not.English native speakers usually say "Yes, please." to show the acceptance, or "No, thank you." to express the decline of the offer.
2.2.2 Conflict of Different Value Systems
The concept of "privacy" is hard for Chinese students to grasp because what is regarded as "privacy" in west is often not thought as such in China, which is due to the different value system between China and western countries.Some native English teachers have complained about the invasion of their privacy by Chinese students, but their Chinese students are innocently unaware that looking through an English teacher's lesson plan without permission or reading his comments on other students' work is intruding on the teacher's privacy.We Chinese like to inquire into the privacy of other people to show friendship and intimacy, but questions about a person's age, salary or the price of an item are perfectly unacceptable in western culture.
2.2.3 Over-Simplification or Over-Generalization
This affects the students' understanding of the West in general and western culture in particular.As Chinese students have few chances to touch the western culture, they only learn those countries from TV programs, films or magazines.In short, pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure are two major sources in Chinese learners' pragmatic failure, and the latter is even worse than the former.Wolfson points out, "In interacting with foreigners, native speakers tend to be rather tolerant of errors in pronunciation or syntax. In contrast, violations of rules of speaking are often interpreted as bad manners since the native speaker is unlikely to be aware of sociolinguistic relativity.”(Wolfson, 1983: 62)⑤
Ⅲ.Teaching Methods
After analyzing the trouble sources of Chinese learners’ pragmatic failure, it is time to solve these problems in the teaching process.In this paper, we will discuss five aspects.
3.1 Teaching Pragmalinguistic Knowledge
The pragmalinguistic knowledge may be taught as part of linguistic knowledge in classroom.The following suggestions are some of it.
3.2 Classroom Activities
Classroom activity is a necessary part in English teaching.It may make the whole class be happy and relaxed.Adopting a scientific way of organizing classroom activities is helpful to English teaching, especially to help students avoid pragmatic failure in their real communication.
3.3 Teaching Sociopragmatic Knowledge
Sociopragmatic knowledge is acquired through various aids in addition to the teaching of linguistic items in class.To bridge the gap between target language and learneres'native language caused by the deficiency of the learners' knowledge on the culture of target language, we recommend the following.
3.4 Stimulating Students' Motivation
Motivation is essential for learning.High motivation is favorable to learning, and this also takes effect in teaching pragmalinguistic knowledge and sociopragmatic knowledge.How to increase students' motivation?The following are three suggestions.
3.5 Developing teachers' professional competence
Imparting knowledge to his or her students is teachers' basic duty.To teach his or her students well, teachers must develop their own professional competence continuously.The most important and difficult part of the making of a good language teacher is the development of professional competence.
IV. Conclusion
Cross-cultural difference is a critical factor leading to the pragmatic failure of Chinese English learners.It exists and will take a long time for language learners to gap.Nowadays, international communication becomes more and more important; it is playing a significant role in foreign affairs among nations.In this sense, we should attach great importance to the cultivation of cultural awareness of our people.It is sure that the most efficient way of realizing this can only rely on the teaching of pragmatics and cultures of English speaking countries.
Besides those aspects we have concluded in this paper, in teaching process, teachers should notice that more substance should be put into teaching, not only the English which is grammatically correct, but also the English which is pragmatically appropriate. From a long-term foresight, we can say through this effort, the misunderstanding and the cross-cultural communication breakdown will be reduced, which will give rise to a easier and more frequent communication and cooperation between China and other English speaking countries.
References:
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[2]J. Thomas. Cross-Cultural pragmatic failure, in Applied Linguistics[A].Oxford:Oxford University Press,1983.324.
[3] J. Thomas. Cross-Cultural Discourse as Unequal Encounter: Towards a Pragmatic Analysis in Applied Linguistics[A].Oxford:Oxford University Press,1984.256-264.
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[5]H.G. Wolfson. Cross-Cultural Communication[A]. Oxford:Oxford University Press,1983. 62.
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