A study on the vagueness in English language teaching from the pragmatic perspective

Abstract

Vagueness, as an intrinsic feature of human language, has caused much attention. Many researches on vagueness have already been done in different fields, namely in daily conversations, newspapers, advertisements, science, literature, business affairs, and the like. However, up to now, most researches on vagueness have been confined to the semantic field, while the pragmatic perspective had not been paid much attention to yet. Besides, so far, much effort has been made on the theoretical study of language vagueness, but less on that in different aspects of English Language Teaching. Since vagueness plays a very important role in English language teaching, a research on this topic is necessary and essential. Based on the theories of pragmatic vagueness, this paper attempts to analyze the pragmatic function of vagueness, various language vagueness phenomena existing in the whole process of English language teaching and its functions. Then some possible suggestions for vague language teaching are proposed, namely, teaching with reference to Chinese, practice based on text, and a thorough understanding of English culture. It is hoped that it is beneficial to English language teaching. © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.