With the globalization of the contemporary economy and society, intercultural communication becomes more and more frequent. However, different cultural backgrounds lead to different language conventions and rules. That will cause misunderstanding even obstacles in the cross-cultural communication. In order to avoid making ridiculous mistakes during communication, people should have cultural awareness and use the language appropriately to make the communication successful. That is the competence of cross-cultural communication. As we all know that through many years of English learning, most Chinese students may have little problem in grammar and vocabulary, but only a small proportion of them can achieve pragmatic competence. So it is necessary to know the pragmatic failures in the cross-cultural communication (Leech, G .N. Principles of Pragmatics [M]. New York: Longman, 1983: 32,150).
About the pragmatic failures, Chinese scholars have done much work and people can see such articles in various periodicals. It was first raised by Thomas, J. He believed that pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication is a common phonemon( Thomas, J. (1983) Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure [J].Applied Linguistics, vol.4 (2):91- 112). However, those articles just discuss or list the different types of the pragmatic failures and analyze the possible reasons causing pragmatic failures.
The thesis aims to study problems and causes in cross-culture communication and this paper also analyzes the differences between English and Chinese learners and then offers some methods. This paper wants to provide the readers with some basic knowledge about the language difference between English and Chinese. Meanwhile, it can help the English learners to develop their language skills to make a smooth cross-cultural communication.
2. Problems in Cross-culture Communication
Scio-pragmatic failure occurs when people do not have fully understanding about each other’s cultural difference in cross-cultural communication thus they choose an improper way to communication with each other and cause a communication breakdown. Oatery (See Hu Wenzhong, 1998)said that the Chinese and western interpersonal relationships in eight aspects in daily conversations, namely, addressing people, initiating conversations, arranging a visit or activity ,conversation topics, greeting others , visiting someone, leave-taking, the use of “Thank you”
Now, I will choose some typical commonly problems to discuss in following parts.
2.1 Greetings
Conventional greeting is a kind of effective means to build and keep social contact. In China, most people tend to greet acquaintances or some people with "Have you had your dinner?" or "Have you eaten?" In Chinese opinion, the questions in the example are natural and normal, but if you greet the native speakers of English this way, it will certainly cause pragmatic failure and they might think you are inviting him to dinner. In fact, it is a Chinese way of greeting when people meet. It has the same meaning with the word "hello" in English. This phenomenon results in a question for us to think over: Why are Chinese are used to using "Have you had your dinner?" or "Have you eaten?” as greeting? Let me take for example the reality in China before Liberation. China was one of seriously famine-stricken countries in the world .Many people were starved to death at that time. Worse still, between 1959 and1961, about 40 million people died of starvation throughout China. That was really a hard time for the Chinese people. Later on, under the leadership of China's Communist Party, the agriculture improved, and people started to lead a happier life. So, Chinese people think that food is the foundation of life. So it is very natural for us to use "Have you had your dinner?" as a greeting. But when we greet English people, we should not act this expression; instead a "Hello" would do.
2.2 Compliments and Thanks
We can also see the cultural differences in view of the ways people express gratitude and compliments. Chinese value of politeness is different from foreign one.People in the West tend to use their gratitude and compliments more than Chinese people, and the Chinese tend to accept thanks and compliments less directly and frankly than the westerners do. To English-speaking people, who is willing to use the remark like” Thank you" to accept the praise from other people. It is assumed that the compliment is sincere and that the praise is for some worthy achievement or things. Therefore, there should be no show of no pretended modesty,false humility. However, modesty is one of the traditional virtues for Chinese people. The customary response to a compliment would be to say that one is not worthy of the praise, or that what one has done is hardly enough. Acceptance of a compliment would imply lack of manners. So we should pay attention to the difference in accepting compliments and thanks.
2.3 Color Words
Though for people all over the world the colors are the same, different nations have different preference towards colors. In different culture, colors indicate different analogical meanings and associations, which are quite opposite sometimes. This difference will bring difficulties to two parties in understanding and communication . Some languages have only two color terms: black and white. The third term is red, if a language has three color systems. A term that may include yellow orange but that has a focal point very close to the “red” of English In addition to the exact fact that different languages may have different divisions of color, different language showsl different color related association. For example, since he was made director, the company has been running in the black, instead of the red. In our traditional mind, black always represents something bad or inferior, while red means joy. However, in this example in the black means to make profit, and in the red means lose the money.
2.4 In other fields
Cultural differences can be embodied in many other fields. Such as religious beliefs, values, taboos, etc. In terms of religious beliefs, China is deeply influenced by Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism while US and some other western countries promote Christianity （Helen Oatey .The Customs and Language of Social Interaction in English）. As for values, it is most evidently reflected in the attitudes towards privacy. In western countries where individualism is encouraged, individual privacy is especially protected and respected by others. However, the concept of privacy is rather weak in China where collectivism is advocated. As for taboos, people who have just met each other for the first time would frequently touch on topics like age, sex, income, marital status which is regarded to be very impolite and offensive in western culture. Moreover, Chinese people created many idioms, some of which can be translated word-to-word into English, while some are not. For example, the idiom "挥 金 如 土" is translated as "spend money like water". These are also caused by different cultures. If we do not take the different cultures into consideration, we are very likely to have pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication.
3. Causes Of Pragmatic Failure
There are various causes of pragmatic failure. The main reasons may be: students’ inappropriate transfer of the mother language and students’ tendency of judging or interpreting behavior different from others according to their own cultural standard and the inappropriate teaching methods. Conflict of different value system and students’ insufficient exposure to the target culture as well as a lack of comparative studies of the two cultures can also lead to pragmatic failure. In the following parts,I just choose some possible reasons to be discussed.
3.1 Inappropriate Transference
Negative transfer of the mother language is the most important reason for pragmalinguistic failure (何自然、阎庄，1986(l): 52-57). EFL Learners transfer the linguistic pattern of their mother tongue into the target language which looks syntactically and semantically similar, but convey a rather many of the Chinese EFL learners’ errors result from the negative transfer of Chinese（ Odlin, T. Language Transfer [M]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 7） .Here is a typical examples for you. When a foreigner visited his Chinese friend, the Chinese host offered him a cup of tea and said, “Please have a cup of tea.” On this occasion, the foreign guest maybe thought his friend was insincerely. In English, “please,” means the speaker want to get benefits from the hearer. But in Chinese, we can use “请”( qing, please) both in offering and requesting situation to show politeness. And here in this situation, we should use “Would you like a cup of tea?”So if we express our own method in a wrong way, it may cause some troubles.
3.2The Difference Of Society and Culture
Domestic researchers considered cultural difference as the primary factor leading to Scio-pragmatic failure .Moreover, according to Halliday, the outstanding English linguist, language is a social behavior and a form of behavioral potency. The whole social environment constitutes a cultural environment. Culture is just the behavioral potency which realizes the meaningful potency through linguistic form and the meaningful potency converts into vocabulary grammatical potency through linguistic system. We can also see that speech behavior is restricted by social culture environment to a great extent. If we always explain the verbal behavior of people from other cultures according to our own cultural standards, it will inevitably lead to unnecessary misunderstandings and even conflict.
Therefore, only paying attention to wording and phrasing, complying with grammatical rules and ignoring social and cultural differences are bound to result in pragmatic misuses and failures. We should emphasis the importance of society and culture and respect the difference.
3.3 Improper Teaching Techniques
It is easy to teach students some linguistic elements, but it takes much more efforts and time to convey how and when to use them appropriately. In teaching, we have many materials that emphasize language rules too much, but seldom strengthen the communicative functions. Much practice is often limited to syntactic considerations and phonological. Although students need to understand some pragmatic principles that charge the performance of speech acts in real communication, some teachers still teach students linguistic knowledge only. Due to using some inappropriate teaching materials, pragmalinguistic failure may occur. Look at these sentences patterns, such as “How old are you?” or “How much do you earn?”etc. Students are required to recite and use them as possible as they can. So, they have the wrong impression that when they meet a foreigner, after greeting, they should use expressions listed above to begin a conversation. In fact, they may touch some taboo topics for English native speakers. Violating a taboo can be quite offensive. Mentioning a certain topic in public would be shocking or cause strong disapproval.
To reduce pragmatic failure, language teacher should develop students’ cross-cultural communicative competence, which sets new and higher requirements for both teachers and students. It is desirable for English teachers to be more learned in the areas of linguistics, literature, and criticism and so on.
4. Measures to Avoid Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure
The finally purpose of learning a foreign language is to be able to communication with native speakers of this country. However, in China many learners think that learning a foreign language means learning the vocabulary and grammar of this country. Finally, more and more people are unable to communicate with the native speakers’ .Moreover, being deeply influenced by their native culture backgrounds, people communicate with their own cultural values, thinking patterns, communicative modes, and linguistic knowledge which lead to pragmatic failures. In that situation, people can neither correctly understand the intensions of other people nor appropriately convey their original thoughts. In intercultural communication, pragmatic failure’s frequent occurrence brings lots of obstacles of understanding each other which has a bad effect on communication .How can we reduce pragmatic failures in intercultural communication? Through the analysis above, I do believe that there are some methods for both EFL teachers and learners. As for teachers, they should teach cultural knowledge, teach with comparisons and teach in contexts. As for students, they should adjusting study attitude, update the schema storage frequently and broaden the general knowledge of both cultures. So we have to cultivate our communicative competence to avoid pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication. So far, there is no systematic way of developing students’ cross-cultural communicative competence, but some possible solutions could be worked out (Stephen, C. Levinson. Pragmatics [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001).This chapter would like to make some suggestions on improving students’ cross-cultural communicative competence.
4.1 suggestions for Language Teaching
As we have seen, the pragmatic failures taking place in all the cases could have been avoided if the non-native speaker had had a meta-pragmatic capacity. As Kasper & Schmidt (1996: 160) say "pragmatic knowledge should be teachable”. There are numerous studies that prove this is so and instruction helps language learners in acquiring pragmatic competence .This shows that teachers are so important for students to avoid pragmatic failures.So I am going to talk the teaching methods from the following aspects.
4.1.1 Teaching Cultural Knowledge
Nowadays, more and more EFL teachers find that a lot of Chinese students who get high marks in exam can not fully understand others or make him or herself fully understood when communicating with foreigners. That is to say, only charging vocabulary and grammar is far from a good English learner. Hu Wenzhong finds that cultural mistakes made them (native speakers) more uncomfortable than grammatical mistakes. So teaching cultural knowledge is also of great importance which has two functions: improving students’ cross-cultural awareness and developing students’ communicative competence. Teachers can pay more attention to the culturally-loaded words or expressions especially those which have no direct equivalents in Chinese, for example, the lost generation, Adam’s apple and so on. During teaching cultural knowledge, there are two principles: first, laying emphasis on cultural teaching is not to say that linguistic knowledge can be ignored. The teacher should balance both sides and make the linguistic content more closely to the practical use in daily life. Second, teachers should make cultural teaching nonjudgmental. We must realize, as Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres has once stated: all people have the right to be equal and the equal right to be different. We should respect cultural diversity and never say that others’ culture is inferior or superior just because it is different from ours.
4.1.2 Teaching with Schemata Comparisons
Robert Labo points out that when the negative transfer happens during the foreign language studying, the learners are able to know the reasons of the problem through comparing the differences between two kinds of cultures. In short, only through comparing those two kinds of cultures, can students realize the differences. Comparative teaching way can work as the core of constructing culture schema structure and make the bring context into lovely. Through comparison and analogy that the relationship can be created between new information and original schema so that students can know more about different cultural schemata. For example, when we come to western women’s social status, we can make a comparative study of the different aspects of educational background, political status, economic condition, etc. In western countries, especially in America the moral culture of equal rights has been deeply rooted in people’s hearts. American women are not always passive, but usually active; they turn compliment into rebellion. While in China, ethics is an important part of China’s traditional culture. In traditional society, Confucianism, the mainstream of social consciousness, expects a woman just to be a good wife and a devoted mother. Through the comparative study, students can build a more comprehensive schema of women’s social status of both cultures which can promote mutual understanding.
4.1.3 Teaching in Contexts
Most English teachers in China still adopt the traditional language teaching method which considers forms and rules of language only but seldom concerns about how to use the forms and rules in the right place and at the right time. It’s better for teachers to create real contexts as much as possible during teaching. First, teacher should supply authentic teaching material. There is a joke I was told several years ago. Once, a Chinese student had an accident on freeway in America and fell off the cliff with his car. When the traffic police came and shouted: “How are you?” the student answered ,with no hesitation: “I’m fine. Thank you! And you?”. After hearing that, the police left and the student lost his life. The reason why the student make such a response is that almost all the answers in text book to that question “How are you?” is “I’m fine. Thank you! And you?” Though it is just a joke, it reveals the problem of our unreal, impersonal and inactive teaching material which is helpful to the study of grammar rules but harmful to the cultivation of students’ pragmatic competence. Under the current Chinese exam-oriented education mode, teachers put more emphasis on the result of written test. It is better to add the test of students’ pragmatic competence. As teachers, it is impossible for them to choose textbook and change the test system. The effective solution they can adopt is to make good use of classroom teaching. They can make the teaching student-centered and carry out various activities which are close to students’ lives and relevant to their interests at class. For example, role-acting ,speech contest, English debating and so on. It aims to arouse students’ initiative to use all the resources around them such as movies ,Internet, books, from which students can get various contexts, So that students can construct real cognitive image schemata from muti-culture perspectives.
4.2suggestions for language learning
Since English is widely used in the fields of politics, commerce and culture, the right use of English is highly demanded in addition to the good command of English skills such as listening,reading,and,writing.Since,we,having understood the major causes to pragmatic failure in cross-cultural,communication.In order to cultivate learners’ pragmatic competence, I shall discuss the following aspects to adhere to in the process of English language learning.
4.2.1 Adjusting Study Attitudes
Under the exam-oriented education mode, most Chinese EFL learners hold the view that the purpose of learning English is to master new words and grammar rules which can help them get high mark in examinations. The way they learn English is just reciting vocabulary and grammar rules as many as they can. But the ultimate goal of learning a language is to have the ability to use this language in communication in right places and at right times which needs both linguistic competence and communicative competence. According to Dell Hymes’ (1972) theory of communicative competence, students should pay attention to four aspects:
a. possibility: whether or not something is formally possible. It is concerned with whether a language permits a sentence as grammatically possible.
b. feasibility: the ability to produce sentences which can be understood by the human brain.
c. appropriateness: the ability to use correct forms of language in a particular situation.
d. performance: the fact that the utterance is completed. Linguistic competence is only a corner of iceberg. In order to perform like native speakers, all the EFL learners should first adjust their purpose of learning a second language and spare no effort to develop their communicative competence.
4.2.2 Updating the Schema Storage Frequently
According to J.Mandler ( Understanding Pragmatics [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1979), schema is just a cognitive structure including slots and default values which are used for filling the slots. Whenever the slot is filled, a schema is formed. Due to the hierarchical feature of slot, schema is highly flexible. Whichever default value is modified, the stored schema should make some changes accordingly. With the more and more bodily interactions with the world, the default values are changing all the time. The process of acquiring knowledge in fact is a process of enlarging and updating the existed schemata. So the schemata stored in our mind are dynamic rather than static. For example, after seeing maple, the color slot of leave is turned from green and yellow to green, yellow and red. Due to the inadequate general knowledge reserve and limited pragmatic competence, the schema stored in mind can never be enough to satisfy our needs. Students should renew reserved schemata and construct new schemata so that the schema storage can be more substantial and comprehensive.
4.2.3 Improving the Understanding of Both Cultures
According to the analysis above, we know that pragmatic failure will occur when the interlocutors have no cross-cultural awareness which describes the sensitivity to the impact of culturally-included behaviors in various kinds of language use including communication. Valdes once states the four goals of cultural instruction:
a. developing a greater awareness of the target culture and a border knowledge about the target culture;
b. acquiring a command of the etiquette of the target culture;
c. understanding differences between the target culture and the students’ culture;
d. understanding the values of the target culture.
As we all know, language is not only a tool of communication but also a bridge which connects the native culture with the outer world. It helps us know almost every corner on the earth and at the same time, it provides a channel for other nations to have acquaintance with us, a great nation with long history. So during the second language learning process, students should consciously enlarge their cultural deposits of not only the target culture but also our own culture such as politics, religions, literature, values, conventions, and so on. By doing this, students can have the awareness of cultural differences and schema diversities so that they can activate the appropriate schema in real-context cross-culture communication.
5. Conclusion
As the globalization of world economy grows faster and the Internet tears down national boundaries, cross-cultural communication is becoming an indivisible part of our daily life. More research on cross-cultural communication. Pragmatic failure is urgently needed to explain and prevent communication breakdown in cross-cultural communication. In this thesis the author has attempted to do an analysis of this issue and come up with some suggestions for avoiding pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication.
Analysis in the third chapter has shown us that the main causes of pragmatic failures are the lack of communicative competence. Communicative competence consists of grammatical competence and pragmatic competence. Though we can learn the grammatical rules of another language; we still need pragmatic competence in cross-cultural communication. For cultivating pragmatic competence we must first know and respect the fact that people have different cultures which will guide them to do things in different ways. A good attitude is the start for everything. Then we can have cultural training to help people to communicate more efficiently.
In intercultural communication, pragmatic failure’s frequent occurrence brings lots of obstacles of understanding each other which has a bad effect on communication. Since intercultural communication is an inevitable trend, research on pragmatic failure in intercultural communication has become a hot issue of both theoretical significance and practical value. The theoretical significance of this dissertation is that it has adopted a cognitive perspective of analyzing pragmatic failures in intercultural communication. This dissertation supplies some strategies for both EFL teachers and students to reduce or avoid intercultural communication pragmatic failures. It is the practical significance of this study. As for teachers, they should teach cultural knowledge, teach with schemata comparisons and teach in contexts. As for students, they should adjusting study attitude, update the schema storage frequently and broaden the knowledge of both cultures.
Due to the poor theoretical ability of the author and the complexity of this problem, thesis of intercultural communication pragmatic failure from the perspective of language learning and language teaching are far from being complete. And the analysis of nonverbal communication pragmatic failures is oversimplified. In the future, more advanced methods should be adopted to get the comprehensive level of Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence, and more theories will be employed to analyze this hot issue which may provide more solutions to reduce pragmatic failures as well as practical teaching methods to promote EFL students’ pragmatic competence.
Fortunately, it is good to see that more people have realized the importance of not being just grammatically competent. As more and more attention is paid to the communicative competence of speakers. We believe that the barriers of cross-cultural will be removed sooner or later.
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