I’m sorry; I don’t quite understand what you mean by…?
Could you explain what you mean by…? [8]
In Challenge to Speak (Book Two, Higher Education Press) (Yao Baohui, 1999: 113), Unit l6: Clarifying and Repeating, “Look at these patterns-Extending Clarifications”:
(I’m) sorry, I don’t quite understand what you mean by…?
(I’m) sorry, but could you explain what you mean by…? [9]
In addition, the same situation occurred in 0ral Workshop: Discussion (Book Two, FLTRP) for far more than once. It is urgently necessary for textbook writers, administrators and instructors to take into account the pragmalinguistic failure while selecting and compiling oral English textbooks.
3. 2 Sociopragmatic Failure
Sociopragmatic failure, a term I have appropriated from Leech (1983), which I use to refer to the social conditions placed on language in use. As another type of pragmatic failure, it is caused by mismatches which arise from intercultural different assessments within some parameters affecting linguistic choice: size of imposition, social distance and relative rights and obligation etc. Sociopragmatic decisions are social before they are linguistic (Thomas, 1983:104). [4] So it is likely that a foreign speaker will assess size of imposition, social-distance, etc. differently from a native-speaker. We can take a further look at the sociopragmatic failure by the following examples:
(8) (Situation: In the English-speaking corner, student is chatting with his foreign teacher Miss Rhona.)
Student: Teacher Rhona, how much do you earn per month in our university?
Rhona: I’m satisfied with my wage.
There are two apparent problems here. One involves the addressing form of the teacher; the other different conventions against different cultural background. The most commonly used form of addressing a teacher in China is “teacher + surname” or “teacher + surname + given name”. But actually, the word of “teacher” cannot be used as form of addressing in English. The student is asking Miss Rhona such a question owing to his curiosity or his desire to converse in English with his foreign teacher. However, he is pushing Miss Rhona into an embarrassed situation. Some non-free topics typically as politics, religious, marital status, income, etc. would never appear in westerners’ routine conversations. Instead, they would choose to initiate their conversations by talking about some impersonal topics such as the weather, sports, circumstances and so on.
Hu Wenzhong (1988) has pointed out that the utterances ranging from giving advice to the use of self-deprecation strategy in expressing irritation, foreigners often felt the excessive offering of advice-they are forever being told what to do, when and how to do it. [10] Although this may be perfectly correct practice in a Chinese setting, westerners may feel annoyed and often insulted by what appears to be scant regard for their own powers of intelligence. For example, Chinese get used to saying something like “Put on more clothes.”, “Drink plenty of Water.” or “Eat more vegetable.” to somebody who is sick. Their solicitude of this kind only arouses westerners’ misunderstanding of being looked upon as naive children. This is because westerners do emphasize self-reliance or independence. Moreover, because of the conventional social distance between the teacher and students, students believe that it is their duty to do things for their teacher, are of which is wiping the blackboard. Sometimes non-native speaker’s judgment of relative power would result in sociopragmatic failure.
A typica1 instance lies in the dialogue between a Chinese passenger (P) and an English native taxi driver (D).
(9) P: Excuse me; I wonder if you could take me to the airport?
D: Oh, well… (At a loss)
Here the passenger thought himself to be in a position of disadvantage for he was not a native speaker and so he spoke very deferentially. As a result, it sounded unnatural and funny. In fact, one word “Airport” is enough. This is because the asymmetrical power relationship exists between the native speaker and non-native speaker. Examples of this sort can hardly be elaborated to full. I have just exemplified in this chapter some common ones.
To sum up, pragmatic failure includes two dimensions: firstly, the hearer misinterprets the speaker’s utterance meaning within a given context due to S's incorrect choice of words and use of ambiguity; secondly, the hearer misunderstands the illocutionary act of the speaker (He Ziran, 1988). [11]
4 Enlightenment on English language teaching
Enlightenment from pragmatic failures can be applied into English teaching. How is it applied into English teaching? What contents of it is useful to guide our teaching?Since English is widely used in the fields of politics, commerce and culture, the fluent and appropriate use of English is highly demanded in addition to the good command of English skills in listening, reading, and writing.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
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