A Study On Pragmatic Failures Of Middle School Students

Language communication is an important form of social communication, but thefirst thing is that people must have necessary linguistic competence. Language is usedin certain social contexts, so people should know how to use language properly indifferent situations. Cultivating pragmatic competence is an important factor to helppeople communicate successfully. However, in the course of cross-culturalcommunication, English learners in China always have a lot of pragmatic failures,which causes unsuccessful cross-cultural communication.This paper is to discuss the pragmatic failures of English learners in Chinesemiddle schools. It mainly attempts to answer the following questions:(1)Within the framework of the New Curriculum Standards, is pragmaticcompetence of middle school students high or low?(2)What is the relationship between linguistic competence and pragmaticcompetence? Does the students’ pragmatic competence proportionately develop aslinguistic competence improves?(3)What are the reasons of pragmatic failures?(4)What are the problems of influencing middle school students’ pragmaticcompetence? How should we help to cultivate the students’ pragmatic competence?This thesis adopts the framework of “Pragmatic Failure” which is proposed by thefamous linguist Jenny Thomas, combining it with the theory of indirect speech acttheory, cooperative principle and politeness principle. Following the quantitativeanalysis of pragmatic competence based on an investigation in the form of questionnaire,the author builds up a theoretical framework to do the qualitative analysis of the sourcesof pragmatic failures and then proposes some effective ways to improve the middleschool students’ cross-cultural communication competence.The findings are:(1) the pragmatic competence of middle school students is still ina lower level;(2) the students’ pragmatic competence does not proportionately developas linguistic competence improves, that is to say, students who have high linguisticcompetence do not necessarily possess equally high pragmatic competence;(3) the main reasons of pragmatic failures are the negative transfer of mother tongue and thecultural differences between East and West;(4) pragmatic theories and cultural inputwould exert some positive influence on correcting and avoiding middle school students’pragmatic failures, which indicates that more importance should be attached to teachingculture and cultivating students’ pragmatic competence; and (5) there exists a series ofproblems in the teaching of English to cause these failures, for example, some Englishteachers cannot tell the language’s cultural connotation and so on, so further teachingreform is needed in secondary education.