A Study Of English Majors’ Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure

With the economic cooperation and cross-cultural communication between countries getting more and more frequent, a good command of cross-cultural communicative competence has become a necessary ingredient for English majors. However, in our language classrooms, more priority is attached to developing students’ linguistic competence, which causes frequent occurrence of pragmatic failure among Chinese learners of English. In the recent decade, with the development of language teaching tools and methods, and the improvement of language teachers’ teaching abilities, has the pragmatic competence of English learners, especially English major students, been significantly improved?Based on the above question, in order to find out the current situation of English majors’ pragmatic failure, an empirical investigation is conducted on English majors’ pragmatic failure, by selecting 156 English major students including 83 freshmen and 73 senior students. Questionnaires are designed to test students’ pragmatic competence. In this thesis, four research questions are mainly put forward:(1) What is the current situation of English majors’ pragmatic failure?(2) Are the types of pragmatic failure changed? If yes, what are the specific types?(3) Is there any difference between senior students and freshmen of English major on pragmatic failure?(4) What are the causes leading to English majors’ pragmatic failure? Based on data analysis and Liu Shaozhong and Zhong Guoshi’s classification of pragmatic failure, and Relevance Theory, the research findings are listed as follows:1) The situation of English majors’ pragmatic failure has been improved, with sociopragmatic failure greatly improved, while the pragmalinguistic competence remaining to be further enhanced.2) Pragmatic failures often occur in pragmalinguistic relevance failure, pragmaindividual relevance failure and pragmacognitive relevance failure, the average failure rates of which are 34.03%, 34.42% and 42.86% respectively. While the average failure rates of sociopragmatic relevance failure and pragmacultural relevance failure are 20.96% and 14.55%.3) The situation of pragmatic failure of senior students is better than that of freshmen.4) Negative language transfer and the difference between Chinese and western culture are the main cause leading to English majors’ pragmatic failure.Based on the problem and causes, some suggestions and implications are put forward.