语用失误对英语教学的启示

2  The Relations between Pragmatics and English teaching
The aims of a language teaching course are very often defined with reference to the four “language skills”: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Spoken language production, learning to talk in foreign language, is often considered to be one of the most difficult aspects of foreign language learning. But speaking is obviously an integral part with regard to one’s language proficiency. A few researches conducted in the late 20th century and early this century are in a sense an alert to our EFL teaching, revealing the negligence or disdain of pragmatic acquisition in the foreign language classroom instruction.
How can an utterance be fully understood? This is concerned with the application of pragmatics on how an ambiguous utterance can be eliminated. How is a sentence in a particular context understood? Learners first have to understand the change of a sentence meaning in that particular situation and recognize the speech act if they want to understand it in communication. How to say what they want to express? They have to learn how to use pragmatic strategies and follow the polite principles. How to use English? The learners have to pay attention to the difference in culture and in applying pragmatic strategies in intercultural communication.
2. 1 The application of the Relevance Theory
Many English words are ambiguous without context. Some of words used in certain situation may be interpreted differently by different hearers. Ambiguity is studied by semantics but explained and analyzed by pragmatics. For example:
(1) Mary cannot bear children.
a) Mary is unable to give birth to children.
b) Mary cannot tolerate children.
In language learning it is often necessary to understand language items in their context, and at the same time to classify the item out of the context to understand it paradigmatically. When faced with ambiguous items, one may disambiguate them by applying the principle of relevance. According to the principle of relevance, the explanation to the sentence intention can be drawn from a sufficient contextual effect from several possible semantic expressions. In the given topic about women’s inability of bearing children, the context in sentence a) contains more relevance than the context in sentence b) Therefore, sentence a) is the actual informative message conveyed by this ambiguous sentence.
Another example:
(2) John is an experienced doctor.
a) John is an experienced doctor, indeed.
b) John is not an experienced doctor at all.
In the process of understanding the example (2), which contains more relevance to the intention of the speaker depending on which explanation proved consistent with the principle of relevance. Suppose that the hearer is more accessible to the context:
c) Recently John has failed in an operation on a patient for appendicitis.
Compared with sentence a), sentence b) contains more relevance, so it has sufficient contextual effect and achieves optimal relevance.
Some more examples:
(3) The professor rapped on his desk and shouted: “Gentlemen, order!”
The entire class yelled: “Beer!”
The professor’s intention by using the word “order” is to require the students to keep quiet and behave themselves in class, but the students twisted “order” in the context deliberately into the meaning “to request somebody to bring drink”.
(4) Prof: You missed my class yesterday, didn’t you?
Stud: Not in the least, Sir not in the least!
The student played truant. The professor asked why he did not attend his class, but the student miscomprehended on purpose “miss” into the meaning “to regret or discover the absence or loss of”.
2. 2 The application of the Speech Act Theory
According to the speech act theory, the same utterance in different contexts produces different effects, e.g.:
 If one says: I am hungry.
There should be more than one interpretation to the sentence. In one context, one could understand that the speaker has a good appetite. He produces this utterance in order to explain why he eats so fast; in another context, one could understand that he wants to get some money from others in order to buy something to eat; still in some particular context, suppose the speaker is a child, we can interpret this utterance as a demand to get something to eat from his parents. The speech act theory accounts for the dynamic system of the language, and places emphasis on language in use. Hence, teachers should not only focus on the static nature of language but also its dynamic nature.
According to speech act theory, in communication, the speaker encodes his intention, the context and presupposition and expresses his ideas through his thought, then turns his ideas to voice by means of language. For example:
(5) Child: I need a ten-speed bicycle, Mum.
   Mother: Sure, you do. 转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net