Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Research
Due to the politics, economy and military power of English-speakingcountries, English is used extensively in the world today. The progress of China’sglobalization has been closely bound up with intercultural communication. Theimportance is that the degree of English proficiency may determine whether one canachieve success in intercultural communication.However, the cultural transfer plays a vital role in intercultural communication.In order to achieve the communicative success, the participants should not only graspa lot of linguistic knowledge, but also know how to avoid negative cultural transfereffectively. Because the pragmatic failure caused by cultural factors is worse thanlinguistic mistakes in most situations, which may create some bad feelings betweennative speakers and non-native speakers. Jenny Thomas (1983) points out that “thegrammatical mistakes may impede the communication, but they always appear on thesurface level, so that the hearer will pay attention to the mistakes which are occurred.”Although the speaker’s grammatical competence is not very strong, native speakersmay be tolerant with grammatical error. On the other hand, pragmatic failure is rarelyconsidered as such by non-native speakers. While the grammatical error reflects aspeaker to be an unskilled language user, pragmatic failure reveals that the speaker isan impolite person. If a non-native speaker speaks frequently in the communication,and he or she commits a pragmatic mistake, the native speakers will recognize his orher impoliteness or unfriendliness. To a large extent, pragmatic failure is more seriousthan a grammatical error.
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1.2 Purpose of the Research
Some scholars have not paid enough attention to the question of this field,although it is urgent to work out. To find the solutions, the relationship betweenculture and pragmatic failure can be revealed in this thesis because it can emphasizethe significance of cultural effect in intercultural communication.Most learners consider that they can express accurate meaning that theirutterances are correct and proficient, but have not noticed the danger behindsuperficial phenomenon. So, the relationship between pragmatic failure and cultureknowledge is worth studying for learners. The mistakes caused by pragmatic failureoften hide behind fluency. Pragmatic failure often appears on the learners who canspeak fluently in the real situation, and the students even are not aware of the mistakesthat they committed. Communication breakdown has great enlightenment for Englishteaching and it also describes the necessity of this research.The theory of pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure, and speech acttheory are the theoretical frames of this thesis. This thesis attempts to test the effect oflearners’ cultural awareness in intercultural communication. The author will discussthe phenomenon of pragmatic failure from the perspective of cultural transfer. Theresearch will make a deep investigation about the pragmatic failures committed byEnglish learners. In this thesis, the author will try to explore students’ pragmaticfailure based on the theory of cultural transfer, discussing the reasons and how toavoid the appearance of pragmatic failure.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Cultural Transfer
The definition of cultura，英语论文，英语论文范文
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