On Pragmatic Failure Among Secondary School Students In English Conversation

This paper mainly studies pragmatic failure committed by secondary school students in English conversation. Pragmatic failure doesn't mean grammatical errors. It refers to utterances expressed at improper moments or in inappropriate ways or manners. The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching and learning is to communicate in the target language. However, a lot of breakdown, conflicts or misunderstanding encountered in intercultural communication are caused not only by English learners' grammatical errors but also by their pragmatic failure. Thomas believes that native speakers are more likely to forgive non-native speakers' grammatical errors than pragmatic failure. Native speakers tend to attribute non-native speakers' pragmatic failure to unfriendliness or ill-will. Though many researches on pragmatic failure have been conducted, there still exist some problems unsolved.Therefore, this thesis attempts to investigate pragmatic failure by conducting a survey through questionnaire among 197 secondary school students. The statistical result shows that there is no significant difference in pragmatic failure produced by the senior and junior middle school students. Chinese secondary school students now tend to accept thanks or praises rather than refuse or deny as before. Pragmatic failure is mainly caused by English learners' negative transfer of their mother tongue, neglect or ignorance of the communication context, cultural differences including thinking patterns, social norms, value systems and so on, differences in pragmatic rules and different ways of implementation of speech acts. The result has supported the point of view that linguistic competence doesn't guarantee pragmatic competence. Pragmatic knowledge should also be taught. It also indicates that the traditional way to response to thanks or praises is changing. Finally, this paper has suggested some ways in which both English teachers and learners can develop their pragmatic competence and raise their cultural awareness in order to avoid pragmatic failure in intercultural communication.