高中生语用失误的个案研究

论文总字数：29024字

摘 要

本文对中学生常犯的跨文化语用失误的原因进行分析。通过个案研究，高中某班级45名学生参加语用失误测试。根据收集上来的数据，对语用失误进行分类和描写，并组织焦点访谈对语用失误的主要原因进行了分析，包括母语文化负迁移、缺少语用常识、语境不明、社会关系误判、过度礼貌、只看字面意义等原因。依此，本文提出了三点建议以提高中学生跨文化语用能力。

关键词：语用失误；个案研究；分类；原因；高中生

Contents

1. Introduction 1

1.1.Study Background 1

1.2.Importance of This Study 2

1.3.Structure of This Study 2

2. Literature Review 3

2.1 The definition of pragmatic failure 3

2.2 The types of pragmatic failure 3

2.3 Related research. 4

3. Methodology 5

3.1.Research Questions 5

3.2.Participants 6

3.3.Instrument 6

4. Data Description 6

5. Findings and Discussion 8

5.1 Negative Cultural Transfer 8

5.2.Lack of Pragmatic Knowledge 9

5.3. Unclear Context 9

5.4.Misjudgement on Social Relation 10

5.5.Literal Meaning 11

5.6.Excessive Politeness 11

6.Suggestions 12

6.1Making Students Aware of Cultural Difference 12

6.2 Giving Guidance on Pragmatic Knowledge 12

6.3 Providing an Environment of Interactive atmosphere 13

7. Conclusion 13

8. Appendix

1. Introduction

To obtain the real situation of English pragmatic failure of high school students, a case study is used to investigate different reasons of pragmatic failure in different classification. Senior 1 Class 4 students of Gongdao middle school in Yangzhou was chosen at random as a case. Study background was described in this chapter firstly. Following this, it goes on to the importance of this study. In the last part, the structure of this paper are supposed to be summarized.

1.1.Study Background

In China, English as a school subject is becoming increasingly more important. There is a increasing tendency that students are attracted to foreign countries to further their study. Although they can understand the literal meaning of utterances when confronted with authentic communication situations, it’s not easy to interpret the meanings correctly, or get their ideas across. Students may fail in their communication due to their errors in syntax, or their inaccurate pronunciation in the target language, but the main cause should be attached to pragmatic incompetence. That is to say, they may be lack of the ability to utilize a language to get a certain aim or to make out what a person say in a assigned context.

1.2.Importance of This Study

This study originates from my visit in Toronto University in 2013, when I got a chance to be an exchange student. At first, I was confident enough to deal with all the things in Toronto.But it ended that I failed in communication with my teachers in Toronto University as well as with the homestay family, which confused me that why so many so-called good English learners can’t make them understood when in real context. In fact, it is a common phenomenon that the English learners may master the language points well,but they have difficulties in interpreting the utterances correctly in authentic communication situations. But seldom will this problem come into public attention. As a result, I conducted this case study so as to raise the awareness of both teachers and students.

1.3.Structure of This Study

This dissertation is structurally divided into six chapters. In the first chapter, the paper gives an introduction on the research background and the importance of this case study. The second chapter, literature review, offers a definition of pragmatic failure and introduces the types of pragmatic failure. What’s more, chapter two also sketches some related researches. Chapter three goes on research methodology that presents the study questions, participants and instruments. Chapter four will have an overall analysis of the collecting data. Chapter five will present the study findings. In the last chapter, a series of suggestions on will be offered based on the discussion and findings in previous chapters.

1. Literature Review

2.1 The definition of pragmatic failure

The concept of pragmatic failure was first proposed by Jenny Thomas (1983) to define the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. According to He Ziran(1997), common mistakes in communication can not be included to pragmatic failure. It is the mistakes made by speakers who fail to fulfill effective communication due to incompatible expressions, infelicitous style of incompatible expressions.

2.2 The types of pragmatic failure

2.2.1 Pragmalinguistic failure

From the conclusions of Honggang’s study (1991), pragmalinguistic failure, which is tightly connected with one’s own language, is defined as the situation in which a language learner unconsciously translates native expressions into a target language while ignoring the pragmatic knowledge.

2.2.2 Sociolinguistic failure

Sociolinguistic failure, on the contrary, is defined as the situation in which a language learner unconsciously translate native expressions into a target language without noticing a certain context( Thomas , 1983:99 ). In his point of view, it includes It includes negative transfer of culture, excessive politeness and misjudgement on social relation.

2.3 Related research.

In 1983, the pragmatic failure was firstly put forward by Tomas,a British linguist. From his point of view, pragmatic failure is more than the wrong usage of a certain language, referring to grammatical mistakes which appeared in daily communication. Expressions not conforming to the custom, inappropriate speaking and improper manner of speaking can be included as well. This analysis means a lot when it comes to the essence of pragmatic failure. Since then, many more researches on pragmatic failure have been done by other scholars. Among them are many famous theories and rules, such as speech act theory, the theory of conversational implication, relevance theory, the politeness principle, the cooperative principle etc, which provided a basis for our study on the pragmatic failure.

In our country, the study on pragmatics and pragmatic failure may date from 1980s. Hu Zhuanglin(1980), who works in Beijing University, published a thesis on Pragmatics in the third issue of Foreign Linguistic. In 1988, A Survey of Pragmatics by He Ziran was published; after that, He Zhaoxiong(1993) published An Introduction to Pragmatics and Jiang Wangqi (1994) published Contemporary Pragmatics. In their findings, different kinds of pragmatic failure was classified. They believe it was these pragmatic failure that prevented students from getting what to say across. As a result, they made some suggestions for English-learners to polish their pragmatic competence.

In recent years,many researchers in our country have also made great contributions to the development of research on pragmatic failure of senior high school students. Among them are Tang Zhenghua(2000), Chen Ying(2001),Zhang Shujie(2005) and so on. In their opinion, there are many factors leading in students’ pragmatic failure,negative cultural transfer and lack of pragmatic knowledge being the top ones.

1. Methodology

3.1.Research Questions

To have a better understanding of senior high school students’ pragmatic failure, a survey consisting of twenty related questions to test their pragmatic competence (to see the specific questions in Appendix 1) is designed . This paper puts forward the following questions.

1. What kinds of intercultural pragmatic failures occur in high school students’ English?
2. What it is that cause such kinds of pragmatic failures?
3. How to avoid such kinds of pragmatic failures and improve the pragmatic competence of the high school students ?

3.2.Participants

Senior 1 Class Four students of Gongdao Middle School in Yangzhou City was chosen to be the participants at random. These students choose English as a foreign language. The small survey was handed out in one of English lessons and the students independently finish the exercises in the limited time. In all, there were 49 students taking part in this quiz and 23 students receiving a focus interview. Thus, the result they contribute to will be typical and authentic. The often-made pragmatic failures are to be found by analyzing the result.

3.3.Instrument

The instruments selecting is based on the research questions. Data is produced by using Founder machine, which can read the answers painted in a blank and then print all the results and statistics. Then, excel is employed to make some tables to present the results. To have a better understanding of the pragmatic failure, focus interview is utilized to 23 students. These students will be asked why or why not a certain choice was made. All the students chosen are at random.

1. Data Description

This chapter makes an description of the data collected. As is shown in table 1, classification is done to have a better understanding of the reasons and pragmatic failure question number when students confront different pragmatic context.In addition, able1 can also reflect the test findings.

Table 1：Classification

Table 2 :Reasons of Pragmatic Failures

1. Findings and Discussion

The previous chapter has described the data collected and has been ready to analysis the data. This chapter mainly focuses on the reasons of pragmatic failures based on the answers of survey questions and the focus interview of 23 students who took part in the survey.

5.1 Negative Cultural Transfer

As is shown in table 2, negative cultural transfer is among the top reasons that why the students make pragmatic failure. Fan Xiaodi has points out(2014) that one’s mother tongue has great influence on a learner’s new-language acquiring. In intercultural communication, being unaware of each other’ s respective social and cultural tradition, the interlocutors may participate in the communication with their own cultural values and use their own cultural systems to interpret the new situations they experience.

Since people of different countries share different cultural values and communicative rules, it goes without saying that it is inevitable for a language learner to confront barriers caused by cultural difference. As is seen in Question 1,7,10,12, the accuracy of there questions focusing on testing learners’ cultural transfer is lower than 20%. It means students don’t do well in this kind of questions.When an American lady accidentally bumped into Wei Lin ,the natural response of Wei Lin the students choose are A and B, which are direct translation of Chinese. While in a simon-pure conservation, what one needs to react is just ‘That’s all right’.In fact, it’s a commonly made mistakes by senior high school students due to the negative cultural transfer.

5.2.Lack of Pragmatic Knowledge

know that pragmatics is the study of how language is used and the pragmatic theories and principles are helpful to explain different language phenomenon. Therefore,“we cannot really understand the nature of language itself unless we understand pragmatics”.(Leech,1983:1). Many students know large number of words, but when the words are put together, it will be beyond their comprehension.When students make this kind of mistakes, they are lack of pragmatic knowledge. Take Question18 as an example. If a students know that “I can’t praise this film too highly”means that he likes the film very much and the film is so good that it deserves high praise, then the students wouldn’t choose A,C or D. We may say that learner’s poor understanding may be, on one hand, due to the limited linguistic proficiency,and on the other, due to the limited access to pragmatic input.

5.3. Unclear Context

A saying goes that no meaning,no context. According to Zhang Shujie (2005), there are many factors contributing to students’ pragmatic failure and unclear context is among them. It is true that all communication is based on a certain context and without context, it’s impossible to make effective communication and utterances would become ambiguous in meaning or even meaningless. Leech(1983:13)characterizes context as “any background knowledge assumed to be shared by S(speaker)and H(hearer)and which contributes to the his interpretation of what’ s means by a given utterance.” That is, people send and receive messages not in isolation but in a specific context. The process of communication is actually a process of understanding and inferring the meaning of the utterance with the help of context.Even the students knows the literal meaning of all the words, it doesn’t mean they can fully understand the utterance in a certain context, as is shown in Question 6,15,16.Take Question 16 for example. In the context of a dinner, by saying‘May I have the biscuits?’, A is meant to indicate that the biscuits are out of his rang and he hopes someone could pass them to him.But many student ignore the context and choose the answer with ‘Yes’.

5.4.Misjudgement on Social Relation

In Question 9 and 14, the can’t judge the relation between the speakers, thus choosing a incorrect answer.If you can take the relationship of the speaker into consideration, you can easily rule out B,C and D in Question 9 because only between teacher and student a formal conservation can appear.It is the same with Question 14.

5.5.Literal Meaning

In intercultural communication, some Chinese learners may know the literal meaning of an utterance, but may fail to understand its contextual meaning, or fail to accurately understand the speaker’s intended force. The meaning of linguistic forms used to perform certain speech acts may change when they are translated literally from Chinese to English. When Chinese learners don’t know the exact meaning of a certain word or expression, they may regard the literal meaning as its connotation and use it in the context improperly. Question 3 and 5 are good examples.

5.6.Excessive Politeness

The Chinese have been modest since several years ago and it has been a wonderful tradition for the Chinese people to be polite to others.However, it can be annoying for the foreigners when you are exceedingly polite, like in Question 2,8,20. There are many kinds of exceeding politeness: 1. The objects are surprised,wondering what happened to the speaker, and show their concern; 2. The objects suspect that the speaker is playing jokes on them. So they speak politely deliberately to them too; 3. The objects take it seriously, considering the speaker may be asking for help.

6.Suggestions

From what has been discussed above, we know what intercultural pragmatic failure is and what the potential causes of pragmatic failure are. Then due to the significance of pragmatic competence for a English-learner in a Chinese class, several suggestions are made to polish students’ s English effective communication.

6.1Making Students Aware of Cultural Difference

As an English teacher, more attention should be paid to cultural difference. If teachers can combine the western culture with language learning, the students will feel much better in language learning. As to the aspects of cultural difference, teachers should not only introduce something about beliefs, values, customs and speaking habits of English-speaking countries, some connotations like idioms should also be mentioned in class. As three participants suggested, it is practical to make good use of textbooks together with authentic materials such as film scripts, newspaper articles and plays, which can offer related cultural information to broaden our students’ cultural knowledge.

6.2 Giving Guidance on Pragmatic Knowledge

To attach more importance to pragmatic knowledge, English teachers are advised to spare an explicit lesson to give some teaching for the students. For example, in a certain lesson, politeness can be introduced to the students so when the students are praised by a foreign, they won’t behave too politely. As a result, they can use this knowledge in more meaningful ways. Awareness-raising activities are helpful to expose students to the pragmatic aspects of language and provide them with the analytical tools they need to arrive at their own generalizations concerning contextually appropriate language use.

6.3 Providing an Environment of Interactive atmosphere

As many participants have maintained in the focus interview, students feel much more relaxing in an engaging environment. In such atmosphere, more opportunities can be supplied for English learners to apply the target language to real situation. In these situations created by teachers which are close to reality, students can better exercise their acquired knowledge. For example, activities like role-play and drama can engage more students in speaking veritable English. One last thing should be pointed out that condition permitting, learners should be encouraged to communicate with English native speakers on and off campus, or through the internet as much as possible, for constant exposure to and use of the language.

7. Conclusion

What is supposed to be pointed out is that since standard of pragmatic competence may be as varied as contexts, it remains to be explored further. As the central part of communicative competence, pragmatic competence is the prerequisite to successful communication. Since communication is a dynamic process which consists of coding and inference, it is not possible to convey all pragmatic rules to students, but it is necessary to raise students’ awareness of those rules by exposing them to authentic materials and practice in context. To minimize the possibility of intercultural pragmatic failure and to be better accepted in the host environment, senior middle school students should learn how to do things with words in a socially and culturally appropriate manner.

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