On Chinese EFL Learners' Intercultural Pragmatic Failures

Grammatical English sentences do not always stand for appropriate English. Students' deficiency in pragmatic competence is bound to lead to pragmatic failures. This research mainly explores the relationship between the Chinese learners' English proficiency and their intercultural pragmatic failures. The aim is to see whether the more proficient the subject is, the less s/he will fail pragmatically or vice versa. Revelation of the relationship necessitates analysis of the pragmatic failures and intensifies the need to integrate pragmatics with pedagogy. It further points out that the development of pragmatic competence shall start with the enhancement of pragmatic awareness.According to the different English language proficiency levels, four groups of students were chosen for the test and then data were collected and analyzed. Three research questions are designed and addressed:1. Will the Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic performance become better or worse as they become more proficient in English? And why?2. Will the pragmatic competence of the Chinese EFL learners advance at the same pace with the fact that their linguistic competence has been improved?3. What causes the Chinese EFL learners' intercultural pragmatic failure?The subjects' pragmatic failures are counted and calculated in this study. Results show that the Chinese English learners fail less pragmatically as their English proficiency improves. However, as the average percentage for each group indicates that the difference between each group is not big. T-test results also show that there is no significant difference between different groups' pragmatic failures. This has a significant difference with the subjects' language proficiency because there exist great differences between the subjects' language proficiency. Therefore, it seems that the subjects' pragmatic competence does not develop at the same pace with their linguistic competence, i.e. they are not positively correlated. This result indicates that there is an urgent need to bring pragmatics and teaching together so that the learners' pragmatic competence can be improved as their linguistic competence is being improved. Being pragmatically competence means less pragmatic failures and less miscommunication, the minimization of which is conducive to smoother and more effective intercultural communication.Based on data collected from the subjects, this study reveals that language proficiency correlates little with pragmatic failures. Based on this, some tentative suggestions on strengthening teaching of pragmatic knowledge and on raising the learners' cross-cultural and cross-linguistic pragmatic awareness as well as pragmatic competence are proposed. Certain limitations are also indicated in this paper.