A Study Of Pragmatic Failures In High School Students' Compositions

The studies of pragmatic failure in China have made great achievements in recent year, and most of them adopted questionnaire as research method and focused on the oral communication. Moreover, most of the research subjects are college students who are English majors or non-English majors. There are few researches on the written texts by using text analysis as research method.Pragmatic competence of students is always a key point in English teaching. Gradually more attentions have been paid to the cultivation of pragmatic competence of high school students. High school students have been studying English for at least six years. Now they are in the process of enlarging their vocabulary and enhancing language ability. However, few researches on pragmatic failures of high school students have been carried out so far.Thereby, the thesis analyzes the pragmatic failures of senior high school students'compositions with the help of text analysis and interview. The research is to discuss the following questions: a). Are there pragmatic failures in high school students'compositions? b). What kinds of pragmatic failures do high school students commit in their compositions? c). What are the causes of these pragmatic failures?The research results show that pragmatic failures do exist in high school students'compositions, and typical pragmatic failures are linguistic mistakes, pragmalinguistic failures and sociopragmatic failures. It can be concluded that the reasons of pragmatic failure are related to mother tongue interference, intralingual transfer and induced factors based on the analysis of composition texts and information from the interviews of teacher and students. It is also hoped that my research will give some insights on how to improve high school students'pragmatic competence in the future.