An Investigation Of Intercultural Pragmatic Failures Of Senior High School Students

The fundamental purpose of English teaching is not only to develop thestudents’ linguistic competence, but also to enable the students to achieve asuccessful communication with their skilled English. Besides qualified languageknowledge, the students should also have a mastery of how to use the language andavoid the pragmatic failures. Pragmatic failures refer to the mistakes that cause thebreakdown of human speech communication. This kind of mistakes does not chieflyrefer to grammatical mistakes, but refer to the inappropriate manner of talking, orthe manner against English expressions improper to the context. The consequencecaused by pragmatic failures is much more serious than that caused by grammaticalmistakes. In recent years, though a large number of linguists and scholars from bothhome and abroad have achieved fruitful results on the researches of the concept,causes and countermeasures of pragmatic failures, their research subjects mainlycenter on college students. This thesis focuses on the pragmatic failures of seniorhigh school students.Guided by related theories on pragmatic principles, pragmatic failures andspeech act theory, the author conducts this study in order to investigate the students’potential pragmatic failures based on her understanding and observation of Englishteaching in senior high school.The research on the pragmatic failures in this thesis concentrates on the behaviorof102students from a key senior high school and100from an ordinary senior highschool through questionnaire, classroom observation and an interview. First, apragmatic test is employed to investigate the subjects’ pragmatic competence, and allthe collected data are analyzed with SPSS13.0. The result of the test shows that thesenior high school students’ pragmatic competence is not satisfactory and needs tobe improved urgently. According to the test result, the author explores the reasonsthat cause the subjects’ pragmatic failures and attempt to find measures to solve thisproblem.The last part is the concluding part, in which the author proposes that Englishteaching in senior high schools should lay equal emphasis on both the students’linguistic abilities and their pragmatic competence in order to reduce or avoidpragmatic failures.