Foreign Students Chinese Greeting Pragmatic Failure

As interpersonal activity starting marks, greetings are essential used in daily interaction, and undeserved greeting terms will lead to communication failure. Chinese greeting terms influenced by Chinese social and cultural factors, can be divided into appellation type, interjection type, greeting type, compliment type and joking type, etc. In the use of Chinese greeting terms, second language learners tend to make some pragmatic errors, resulting in the cross-cultural communication obstacles.The paper based on the statistics of Chinese greeting terms from" Development of the Chinese" series textbooks as well as the author's teaching experience investigates how the students of the beginning, intermediate and senior language levels use Chinese greetings by questionnaire designed. Research results show that students tend to copy idiomatic expressions from their mother tongue when using Chinese greetings, and phenomena like a "hi" everywhere etc, pragmatic errors on greeting type and appellation type are also very prominent.On the basis of investigation and study, we think teachers should strengthen the cultivation of students' pragmatic competence in the process of teaching. We can open up interesting theme lectures to international students to help them understand Chinese greeting terms better; In the classroom, we can use methods such as contrast, classification, cultural introducing, scene, multimedia etc. to help students grasp and practice Chinese greeting terms. Meanwhile, students also should make full use of the learning environment, and communicate with Chinese native speakers positively to improve their communicative competence.