Pragmatics in EFL Classroom: Avoiding Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication

74 ENGLISH EDUCATION Journal of English Teaching and Research Pragmatics in EFL Classroom: Avoiding Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication Nailul Author Restu Pamugkas1, LutfinaTarita Wulandari2 Yayasan Al Madina UNSIQ Wonosobo1, SMP Negeri 1 Leksono Wonosobo2 nailulauthorrestup@gmail.com1, sinonafina@gmail.com2 Abstract In teaching language along with its culture, teacher should take pragmatic aspects into consideration since understanding pragmatics will help foreign language learners to avoid false interpretation which will cause misunderstanding in communication between speakers with different culture and social backgrounds. It is called as pragmatic failure which usually takes place in cross-cultural communication. Since pragmatics plays quite important role in communication, it is important for foreign language learners to have sensitivity of cross cultural pragmatics, commonly known as cross cultural or intercultural pragmatic awareness. However, teaching language along with culture seems to be problematic, since it is relatively difficult to choose which aspect(s) of culture to teach, what content to include, and how to represent cultures implicitly under study, which presents differences from the norm of students’ local culture. Therefore, this paper tries to explore the essential issues of spoken discourse, pragmatics, cross cultural pragmatics, pragmatic failure, pragmatic awareness, and its implication to pedagogy. Keyword: Pragmatic failure, EFL classroom, cross cultural communication.


INTRODUCTION
It is commonly known that by the time being, the development of knowledge and technology has brought people closer together, which results in the phenomenon of the world as a "global village" (Kawar, 2012, p. 105). This sort of condition causes people from diverse background and ethnicity to work and communicate each other. It may be of interest to know that people with different cultures should interact each other in this globalization era. However, to be able to communicate smoothly with other people from various backgrounds, the interlocutors should be aware of those cultural diversities, along with pragmatic aspects within. Kawar (2012) outlines that in communicating with people from diverse custom, interlocutors should be able to identify the proper way of saying, what are classified into do and don'ts, and to be conscious of cultural taboos, since every language users. One of them is the requirement to be competent in English that will help language users to connect with people from different culture and social backgrounds by concerning all of the values and norms, and pragmatics aspects within the language and culture. According to Matthews (2012), it is quite essential for society -which seeks for viablebenefit in the global market -to understand how globalization can affect cross-cultural communication. He further claims that "as society becomes more globally connected, the ability to communicate across cultural boundaries has gained increasing prominence" (Matthews, 2012, p. 325).
Perhaps these are the reasons why the incorporation of culture into the second/foreign language curriculais needed to implement, especially in English language education in Indonesia. Cultural aspect has been clearly included in one of the core competences of 2013 Curriculum officially written in the Ministry of Education andCulture No. 37 2018 (PermendikbudNomor 37 Tahun 2018). In teaching language along with its culture, teacher should also take pragmatic aspects of language into consideration, since understanding pragmatics will help the language users avoid false interpretation which will cause pragmatic breakdown in intercultural communication. Since pragmatics plays quite important role in communication using language, it is important for L2 learners to have sensitivity of cross cultural pragmatics, which is commonly known as cross Journal of English Teaching and Research cultural or intercultural pragmatic awareness. However, teaching language along with culture seems to be problematic, since it is relatively difficult to choose which aspect(s) of culture to teach, what content to include, and to represent cultures implicitly under study which presents differences from the norm of students' local culture. Therefore, this paper tries to explore the essential issues of spoken discourse, pragmatics, cross cultural pragmatics, pragmatic failure, pragmatic awareness, and its implication to pedagogy.

Spoken Discourse
According to some experts, discourse means the language in use. Therefore, discourse analysis is considered as the study of the language in use (Gee, 2011&Flowerdew, 2013. The analysis of discourse can be implemented by both spoken discourse and written discourse. If we refer to Cutting (2011), what makes spoken language differs from written language is that the former is considered as a manifestation of the process of speech creation, whereas the latter is a product which has been altered and polished. It becomes a little bit hard, however, to find the absolute differences between the terms 'spoken discourse' and 'written discourse' since the border is less clear than that. In further, Cutting (2011, p. 155) states that "There is a cline from spontaneous spoken discourse (unplanned and semi-planned) to non-spontaneous spoken discourse (semi-scripted or scripted) to spontaneous written discourse (unplanned and semi-planned) to non-spontaneous written discourse (polished scripts)". The clear explanation of those sorts of spoken and written discourse revealed by Cutting (2011) is included in the following paragraph.
It is believed that spoken discourse commonly occurs unplanned, meaning that utterers cannot predict exactly what they will state before they actually spit it out, and they set the organized words as they are talking. The casual conversations like having casual conversation with friends at the coffee shop and chatting with strangers on the bus are the examples of this unplanned spoken discourse. If most of spoken discourse is unplanned, then it is less arguable to say that mainly spoken discourse can take place in form of semi-planned, which means that an idea or topic has been prepared by the speakers concerning the type of objects that they intend to say before they actually reveal it. This semi-planned spoken discourse │Volume: 5 │Number: 1 │May 2020│E-ISSN: 2503-4405│P-ISSN: 2580-3441│ Nailul Author Restu Pamugkas, LutfinaTarita Wulandari |77 Pragmatics in EFL Classroom: Avoiding Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication usually happens in complex discussion which requires the speakers to choose rehearsed words carefully such as job interviews. The third type of spoken discourse is semi-scripted spoken discourse, which has similarity to semi-planned spoken discourse with the exception of the planned words that have been inscribed. What makes it different from scripted spoken discourse is that it requires creativity. It happens in a presentation, in which the presenter uses a written list of points and power point slides while to assist him/her in explaining the materials. Spontaneous written discourse occasionally occurs in form of semiplanned writing for instance: scrawled notes, mind maps, text memos, emails, chatroom texts and Facebook chats. Nevertheless, this paper will be focusing more on spoken discourse rather than the written one.
In speaking, conveying a message to the listener(s) becomes the major aim of the speaker. In order to do that, the speaker should produce some utterances which sometimes include two type meanings, i.e. literal denoting (semantic) and non-literaldenoting (pragmatics). The following description is proposed by Griffiths (2006) in order to distinguish pragmatics from semantics: If you are dealing with meaning and there is no context to consider, then you are doing semantics, but if there is a context to be brought into consideration, then you are engaged in pragmatics. Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, semantics is the study of sentence meaning and word meaning. (p. 6) Adding to this, Carston (2002) confirms that there is usually, but not always, a divergence between what a person says and what he/she intends to convey. It means that the speaker produces utterances or linguistics expressions which seem to be different from the intended meaning he/she is trying to communicate by using them. Some distinction of this is made by working in pragmatics and it is confirmed by our daily experience as speakers and hearers. As cited in Koksal (n.d.), Leech even gives a clearer explanation about the difference between semantics and pragmatics by providing an example. He states that the similarity between semantics and pragmatics is that both of them deal with meaning. However, the verb "mean" has two different functions. For example, the question "What does X mean?" demands the hearer to present semantic meaning, Journal of English Teaching and Research while the question "What did you mean by X" takes him/her to pragmatic one (Koksal,nd,p. 631). What can be drawn from those explanations is that pragmatics refers to the speaker-listener interaction dealing with the use of and the interpretation of utterances which sometimes presents a divergence between the linguistics expression and the intended meaning.

Pragmatics
The real communication between interlocutors with different background is not as simple as pressing the buttons on a remote control affecting circuits in a television set. What makes it sometimes complicated is because in communicating, as explained by Griffiths (2006), the listener should guess the speaker's intended meaning. Only if the intention is precisely recognized, the message is considered to be successfully communicated. In order to anticipate miscommunication, the speaker should carefully decide what he/she needs to say to make the listener understand what he/she is intending to convey. There will be three consequences that remain exist (Griffiths, 2006): Sometimes, different ways are used to communicate the same message, and, vice versa, different messages are conveyed by using the same linguistics expression. It depends on what -in reference to the context -will enable the listener to catch the intended meaning of the speaker. It explains why the writer previously mentioned that human communication is not as simple as pressing the button of a remote control.
2) "The active participation of the addressee sometimes allows not to be communicated with just a little having been said" (p. 2).

3)
Mistakes can possibly occur during the interaction. It is true that in face-toface interaction, the listener's reaction can be easily recognized by the speaker (e.g.: grins, scowls, spoken responses, actions). These reactions can be used to help the speaker judging whether or not the listener successfully interprets the conveyed messages, and if the listener does not, the speaker can add more expression to (1) cancel misunderstandings and (2) give further guide for the listener towards what message really is intended to convey. The situation will be slightly different during the telephone Therefore, it is quite reasonable to say that learning pragmatics is important for second language (L2) learners to help them recognizing that there is actually a complex process of conveying a message from the speaker to the listener which may result in multiple interpretations. To illustrate this, the interpretation of example (P.1) by Griffiths (2006, p. 6) will be explored in terms of three apparent stages: literal meaning (semantics), explicature (pragmatics), and implicature (pragmatics). For example in the sentence: That was the last bus (P.1).
The factual meaning of an utterance is grounded on the semantic elements of a particular language the interlocutors learn. Therefore, the above example, (P.1), can be analysed as follows: that is considered as something salient is equated; and since the utterance is in a past tense form, it can be assumed that it appears at an earlier time; and since there is no context to consider, last can mean final or recent. The meaning is recognized without any consideration of who the speaker is, when the utterance is spoken, and where the interaction actually takes place. In other words, there is no context involved to take into account.
Different from literal meaning -which is barely based on semantic information -in explicature, the interlocutors needs to use contextual information and word knowledge in order to precisely interpret the messages. It means that a particular utterance may be interpreted differently depends on the context involved. If the example (P.1) is actually a comment produced by first interlocutor (I1) in response to second interlocutor's (I2) text message: Missed 10 p.m. bus, then (P.1) might mean that was the final bus on tonight's schedule going to where I know you were intending to travel. However, if example (P.1) is a bus driver's response passenger's question: Some of these buses go to Yogyakarta via Temanggung; is this one of them?, then (P.1) can be interpreted as "The previous bus that left from here was one of those that goes via Temanggung".
It can be clearly seen from the above example that the explicature of an utterance works beyond its literal meaning. This explicature is classified into Journal of English Teaching and Research pragmatics since there are contexts to take into interlocutors' account. In the above example, context (1) helps the listener to get rid of such disambiguation between final and previous meanings of last, and (2)  conversation is conceived of as discourse activities which construct together to make coherent social interaction. Grice's cooperative principles can be defined as concept of conversation as the agreeable interaction of two parties within the advancement of a common set of purposes (Grice, 1998).

Cross Cultural Pragmatics
Matthews (2012) claims that culture is able to affect how a person perceives the actions of others. However, to start with, it is needed to know how the term culture is defined. Kawar (2012, p. 105) defines culture as "the inherited values, concepts, and ways of living which are shared by people of the same social group." He even explain the explanation more specific by dividing it within two forms of culture, which are local and generic cultures. The former is illustrated as a shared culture of all human living on this planet. Meanwhile, the later can be referred to symbols and schemas shared by a particular social group. In language culture, some aspects of pragmatic might be involved. Spencer-Oatey in Fujiwara, 2004). As cited in Fujiwara (2004), Kasper and Schmidt pinpoint that in the linguistic realisation and the sociopragmatic judgement in contexts, the CCP approach tends to highlight the cross-cultural similarities and differences.
It is necessary for the language usersto understand of the complexities which may occur in cross cultural communication. According to Koksal (n.d.), those difficulties are generally distinguished into three different levels:

Socio-Cultural Level
Koksal (n.d., p. 631) defines culture as "a shared set of beliefs, values, and patterns of behaviour common to a group of people". That each country has its particular culture is commonly recognize by most of language users. This sort of condition will results in cultural differences, which might exist in several areas like (1) time, (2) space, (3) politeness, and (4) addressing (Koksal, n.d.).
First, to make an effective cross cultural communication, the interlocutors should consider what Koksal (n.d., p. 631) called as "the language of time", since time is often viewed and used differently by people from different cultures. An example that can be given is that in the US, it is quite acceptable to assign the deadline of a particular work, however, it is possible that in some other countries assigning deadline is considered as rudeness.
The second difference may occur in the area of space. There might be differences between people from different cultures in using the space during conversation. Americans, for example, may be uncomfortable with a very closestand of their Middle East-colleagues when they are engaged in conversation.
The third area is politeness, which is sometimes involved in grammatical, lexical and phonological systems. It is considered that politeness usually, but not always, reflects of status, social class and role. The last area pointed out by Koksal (n.d.) is addressing, which can be applied in different ways. The sender can address his/her addressees by using their title, first name, last name, nick name, or some combination of these, with consideration of avoiding the problem or rudeness.

Socio-Pragmatic Level
As cited in Koksal (n.d.), Crystal and Mezulanik argue that "pragmatics is related to stylistics and sociolinguistics in their study of social relationships existing between participants, and of the way extra-linguistic setting, activity, and subject matter can restrain the choice of language features and varieties" (p. 633). Koksal (n.d.) maintains that the creation of politeness expressions tends to be general. However, there is still possibility of misunderstanding to occur in cross cultural communication. He argues that German speakers tend to be more to the point than English speakers. This sort of condition may result in opinion that German speakers are less polite than English speakers. From this example, it can be inferred that politeness may be interpreted differently by people in every society. Therefore, it is not too much to say that the language users should relate pragmatic descriptions to specific social conditions.

Pragma-Linguistic Level
Something that differs linguistic level from pragma-linguistic level is that at the linguistic level, the main target is more on the particular lexical, phonological and grammatical realisations of the text as devices that maintain cohesion and coherence; meanwhile, at the pragma-linguistic level, what the speaker is intending to do with the language should be identified and precisely interpreted.The speaker's decision of the language in social inter-action and the effects of that choice on the receiveris also taken into consideration. As has been explained previously, the interlocutors' choice of sounds, structures and lexical items from the sources of the language in social communications are strongly affected by pragmatic factors.

Sometimes misinterpretation occurs in cross cultural communication which
then results in miscommunication. This false inference is usually caused by false explicature (Moeschler, 2004). This theory is in stark contrast to classical pragmatics which deals with misunderstanding in general and intercultural in particular. As stated in Moeschler's (2004) article, classical pragmatics believes that misunderstandings are due to what is implicated, instead of what is said. As has been mentioned before, false assumption will automatically lead to false higher-level explicatures which then causes intercultural misunderstanding. From that conversation, it can be interpreted that the first speaker (P.2) arrived in a foreign country and he/she needs some help. Moreover, it is very risky to travel alone at night. Hence, the utterance of asking how to go from A to B is to ask for some help to go from A to B. However, the second speaker (P.2) failed to take the first speaker's intention.Thus, the crucial implicated premise is to ask for some help, and in Western European culture, the host's duty is to manage and keep practical worries as minimal as possible (Moeschler, 2004). That is why the writer argues that it is considered to be quite reasonable for Jie (2010) to say that "the more knowledge learners know about target language's culture, the easier it will be for them to reach effective communication" (p. 43).

Journal of English Teaching and Research
Therefore, it is very essential to take into consideration cultural awareness in the process of studying and acquiring second or foreign language.

Cross cultural pragmatics awareness
As has been discussed previously, pragmatics competence focuses more on the language users' ability to use target language properly in target language's cultural background. A lack of the competence will lead to pragmatic error. This might be the reason why cultural awareness provide a vital role in language learning and teaching (MA, 2013). To help the L2 learners in building their sense of pragmatics, Jie (2010) proposes a number of different level which are worthy to get their attention:

Words level
According to Jie (2010), the sense of word can be divided into two: linguistic and cultural appreciations. The latter is considered as the result of the subjective evaluation done by people whose background is culturally the same. If the evaluation is done by people from two or more different culture, it will result in different interpretation. As the consequence, the effective communication will be interfered.
Therefore, it is relatively acceptable to say that in learning vocabulary, L2 learners should always take words cultural senses into account whichare those concerned with animals, colours, flowers and taboos. For instance, the denotation meaning of the word dog in English and Chinese might be the same. However, different interpretation occurs in reference to its connotation meaning in those two languages. In Chinese, the word dog is usually negatively used to refer to someone who is disgusting. On the contrary, Western people tend to relate the word dog to loyalty, faith, bravery and intelligence. No wonder that the listeners may sometimes hear Chinese negative expression of dog, as the opposite of positive expressions using the words elephant, magpie, and bat. Of course these positive trademarks of Chinese might be hardly accepted in Western culture (Jie, 2010).

Sentence level
Something that possibly causes pragmatic failure is not always the cultural diversity. It is sometimes caused by what so called a "deficiency of learner's │Volume: 5 │Number: 1 │May 2020│E-ISSN: 2503-4405│P-ISSN: 2580-3441│ Nailul Author Restu Pamugkas, LutfinaTarita Wulandari |85 Pragmatics in EFL Classroom: Avoiding Pragmatic Failure in Cross-Cultural Communication knowledge" (Jie, 2010, p. 43) regarding target language's lexical and grammatical usage that is then commonly known as pragmatic-linguistic failure. Take an utterance Never mind as an example, for some culture, this utterance may be interpreted as a response to somebody's expression of thanking. Differently interpreted, for some other cultures, the same utterance can be used as a respond to other's expression of apology. Another example, native speaker of English will easily understand when someone says I cannot agree with you more means that the person is absolutely agree with the addressee's opinion. Unfortunately, for speakers from different culture, this kind of utterance appears to be confusing.

Discourse level
Discourse level (DL)is considered as the stage of language users are able to present the entire ideas in an organized manner either in spoken or written form.Pragmatic failure on DL is closely related to "cultures and constitutions of communicator's native language" (Jie, 2010, 43). Non-native speakers of English tend to unintentionally do transfer on the language patterns from their native language to English.For instance, non-native speakers unintentionally borrow his/her language pattern to deliver his/her intentionon the occasion of "greeting", "complimenting" or "accepting gifts".

Teaching Pragmatics and Culture to EFL Students
It is considered to be a demanding task to properly act and behave in another culture. According to Jie (2010), when teacher is going to train culture in his/her language class, he/she should prepare at least three objectives: "(1) To get the students familiar with cultural differences; (2) To help the students transcend their own cultures and see things as the members of the target culture; and (3) To emphasize the inseparability of understanding language and understanding culture through various classroom practices" (p. 46).
Generally speaking, these objectives illustrate that sometimes, when a L2 learner wants to have a good understanding of structural aspects of a particular language, willynilly he/she should also deal with a conscious understanding of the cultural background of the target language he/she is trying to learn. It means that to be proficient in English, an L2 learner will have much to do with grasping of that Journal of English Teaching and Research culture, since bothlanguage and culture are interwoven at different levels of linguistics structure, and cannot be separated without losing their significances.
Besides, it is also necessary for both teachers and students to have a good environment for studying English. Therefore, they are strongly suggested to work together to build such a natural atmosphere and proper context of environment.
In teaching pragmatics and culture along with English, there are several strategies that can be applied by teachers. Those strategies are categorized into active strategy and passive strategy (Jie, 2010). According to Jie (2010), active strategy can be defined as the strategy which is actively adopted in order to solve the problems in communication. For example, the language users are taught to use both verbal and nonverbal sources in order to get what the speaker intends to convey. This strategy can enhance communication effectiveness. Seeking for help can also be categorized into the basic social interaction strategy, in which the language users ask for clarification, verification, and/or correction. All of those active strategies avoid the interaction to break down. The interaction is expected to smoothly take place although the interlocutors have limitation in linguistic and social knowledge.
Slightly different from active strategy, in passive strategy, reduction like suspension, simplification and avoidance are applied. The confusion in interaction can be suspended by using this passive strategy. Passive strategy can also be used to tolerate the incomprehensibilities in cross-cultural communication. False interpretation and puzzles may arise knowing that cross-cultural communication is of ambiguous characteristics. Therefore, "one should be willing to tolerate the communication counterparts' ideas and propositions that run counter to his culture systems or norms" (Jie, 2010, p. 45). Besides making the communication to take place smoothly proper use of strategies is expected to create the condition for successful communication.
The practical expressions used in daily life can be used as the materials to teach cultural pragmatics. The example is taken from a basic competence occurs in 2013 Curriculum for English subject. In Indonesia, asking about other people's activities are common in order to show the sender's hospitality. Questions like What are you doing or where will you go or what will you do might not cause the addressee to feel less comfortable. However, for western people, those questions appear to be quite annoying. They might be say in their mind that's none of your business when they hear those kinds of questions. Therefore, the writer absolutely agree with Knutson (2006, p. 599) who says that "an analysis of learners' real world and academic needs, in terms of cultural knowledge, awareness, or ability to function in culturally appropriate ways, is a first step. With whom will students be interacting, and in what contexts?" It is indeed important that language teachers should provide L2 with the necessary activities to offer adequate pragmatic competence into target language (Alinezhad, 2015). Kasper in Rasekh (2005) points out two type activities that are significance to develop pragmatic competence which are the activities raising students' pragmatic awareness and, activities offering occasions for communicative practice.
In the end, pragmatic competence is one of major goal for all teachers who teach English as a second or foreign language, which concurrently embodies a challenging task as well.

Conclusion
The analysis of discourse can be implemented in both spoken and written discourse areas. However, it is a little bit hard to find the absolute differences between the terms 'spoken discourse' and 'written discourse' since the border is less clear than that. Mainly spoken discourse occurs unintentionally, meaning that the speakers are not sure what they will express before they actually spit it out, and their words are set together while they are talking. In speaking, conveying message to the listener(s) becomes the major aim of the speaker. In order to do that, the speaker should produce some utterances which sometimes include two kinds of meaning, i.e. literal meaning (semantic) and non-literal meaning (pragmatics). Both of them are involved in human communication. What makes human communication sometimes complicated is because in communicating, as explained by Griffiths (2006), the listener should guess the speaker's intended meaning. Only if the intention is precisely recognized, the message is considered to be successfully communicated. However, sometimes the message cannot be understood by the listener because of the cultural difference between the speaker and the listener.
A people can be affected by his/her own culture dealing with how he/she perceives of other people actions. In the culture of language, some aspects of pragmatic might be involved. Cross Cultural Pragmatics (CCP) can be said as a subfield of pragmatics. It gives emphasize on both similarities and differences in pragmatics strategies that exist between two language and/or cultures. It is necessary for the language communicators to understand the complexities which may occur in communication among different culture and background. Sometimes misinterpretation happens in cross cultural communication which then results in miscommunication, which is known as cross cultural pragmatic failure. It is, indeed, considered to be a demanding task to properly act and behave in another culture. Therefore, in teaching pragmatics and culture along with English, there are several strategies that can be applied by teachers. Those strategies are categorized into active strategy and passive strategy.