| English, as a communicative tool, plays an increasingly important role in the international communication. In the cross-cultural communication, Chinese students may speak English fluently but there still exists pragmatic failure at the same time because their pragmatic competence is poor, which may lead to unsuccessful communication. Therefore, English learners not only need to understand the communicative meanings in the conversation, but also need to know how to express themselves appropriately in English, which can let the communication go smoothly.Nowadays, pragmatic failure is one of the most prominent problems in English teaching. This empirical study focuses on the students of two classes of Grade 8 in Pingdingshan No.1 Middle School exploring the current situation of English learners’ pragmatic competence in middle school and analyzing some underlying causes of pragmatic failures. Based on those causes, the author comes up with some teaching strategies, and then verifies the effectiveness of those strategies by the experiment so as to get some enlightenments from this research for the cultivation of English learners’ pragmatic competence in middle school. In this study, the following three research questions will be answered:1. What is the current situation of English learners’ pragmatic competence in middle school ?2. What are the underlying causes of pragmatic failures of English learners in middle school ?3. What teaching strategies can develop the English learners’ pragmatic competence in middle school effectively ?To know more about the current situation of English learners’ pragmatic competence and underlying causes of pragmatic failures of English learners in middle school, the students in both classes receive a questionnaire and a pre-test, and the author also prepares a questionnaire with different questions for 12 teachers before entering overall implementation stage of the experiment. Then the author analyzes the results of questionnaires and pre-test and comes up with some suggestions. The author adopts different teaching strategies in two classes during the whole research. Traditional teaching methods are used in the control class and the teaching strategies proposed by the author are used in the experimental class to let students be exposed to more pragmatic knowledge and western conventions. When the experiment is over, the students in both classes also receive a post-test. All the test results are analyzed by SPSS software to help author draw a conclusion.This study has found that:1.The average pragmatic competence of the subjects is not satisfactory, especially when it comes to the speech acts of apologizing and responses, gratitude and responses, requests and responses, refusing and addressing. 2. Apart from two typical aspects: cultural differences and the negative mother tongue transfer, there are still some possible causes of pragmatic failure, such as English teachers’ unawareness of cultivating the pragmatic competence, inadequate and improper materials, lacking of English-speaking environment. 3. The teaching strategies proposed by the author are proved to be useful and effective and are considered as the students’ favorite teaching strategies, such as task-based and student-centered teaching strategy; cooperative teaching strategy; integrating culture into language teaching; providing authentic input. |
