A Study Of Pragmatic Failure In Senior Middle School Students' Writing In English

Pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication is a common phenomenon. Such failure may hinder the achievement of the communication purpose or even lead to the breakdown of cross-cultural communication. Pragmatic failure results from the differences or conflicts among pragmatic principles originated from different cultural contexts, such as politeness principles, indirect speech acts and so on. In cross-cultural communication, a foreign language user's pragmatic failure may make him/her suffer from the impression of behaving rudely or impolitely. As a result, a language learner's grammar competence and pragmatic competence should be equally developed.The study is undertaken among senior students from three grades in a nationalities' middle school in Yunnan with the purpose of finding out the possible pragmatic failures in senior students' writing in English. This study employs questionnaire research to collect research data. The results of the study show that there exist pragmatic failures in senior students' writing in English, ranging from the layer of address forms, speech acts to the layer of discourse, including pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. The study does not follow the usual way to discuss pragmatic failure in the two categories. Instead, the study takes the perspective of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication to explore the causes of the pragmatic failure made by students in their writings. The study makes the conclusion that the lack of cultural awareness and cross-cultural communication awareness is the hidden cause of such pragmatic failures, while the ignorance of politeness principles and improper use of speech acts directly result in pragmatic failure in senior students' writing in English.The study also makes a survey to learn about whether the senior students use the written English in real communication, how much they rely on classroom teaching, and their attitude towards the correctness and tactfulness and relates the results to the teaching. The study suggests that English language teachers should...