A Study Of Pragmatic Failure And Junior English Teaching

Pragmatic failure has attracted much attention in the field of pragmatics and applied linguistics. The term "pragmatic failure" is adopted from an article by J.Thomas(1983). She states that pragmatic failure refers to the inability to understand "what is meant by what is said". GLeech(1983) said, "the transfer of the norms of one community to another may lead to pragmatic failure". In other words, pragmatic failure refers to communication breakdown resulting from being unable to realize a variety of pragmatic differences. Different from grammatical errors, pragmatic failure may be misunderstood that a non-English native speaker is being deliberately impolite, unfriendly, or even rude.Scanning the works and articles about pragmatic failure, we find that the subjects being investigated are almost all college students. Some researchers (Hong Gang, Yan Zhuang) have come to similar conclusion. That is, pragmatic competence does not necessarily develop with the length of time the learners study English.As for Junior students, few concerns are shown to their pragmatic failure. In fact, the study of English learning in the period of foundation education is also an important field that should not be neglected. New course standard sets our teaching aims focusing on comprehensive usage of language ability so as to meet the communication needs of the country. However, English teachers usually pay more attention to linguistic competence than pragmatic competence. For this reason, I conduct an analysis on Junior school students' pragmatic failures in their compositions. The ultimate purpose of the research is to discover the causes of pragmatic failure, identify a practical solution and improve the students' pragmatic competence.The thesis consists of seven chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion. In the introduction, I mainly give a general picture of the current situation and present the significance of the relationship between pragmatic failure and Junior English teaching.In Chapter One, I review the history and present the definition and categories of pragmatic failure. According to Thomas(1983), pragmatic failures can be summed up into the following two: pragmalinguistic failures and sociopragmatic failures.The theoretical support is given in Chapter Two. I mainly discuss pragmatic competenceand pragmatic principles. By discriminating communication and pragmatic competence, I offer the definition and crux of pragmatic competence. It is very important to avoid pragmatic failure in the course of forming pragmatic competence, teaching and learning pragmatic principles at the same time.Chapter Three is the design of research on pragmatic failures of the students from Dongjia Junior Middle School of Licheng District of Jinan, who are randomly selected from 8 classes in Grade3. Its contents include objectives, subjects, instrument, procedures, data collection and analysis.In Chapter Four, I make the data analysis and explore the causes of pragmatic failure, such as improper teaching, cultural differences and weakness of pragmatic competence. The conclusion is that the learners who are not fully aware of the culture differences existing in both Chinese and English may exhibit pragmatic failure.In Chapter Five, I have tried to find out the implications for Junior English teaching and make some tentative suggestions on avoiding pragmatic failure and improving students' pragmatic competence, such as, integrating culture into language class, introducing pragmatic principles and fostering pragmatic competence.The conclusion summarizes this thesis and addresses its limitation and weakness.