A Study On The Pragmatic Failure In English By Junior High School Students

Pragmatic failure refers to the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. Withthe frequency of communication between countries, many scholars focus on the study ofintercultural communication. It is unavoidable to produce pragmatic failure whencommunicating with people from different culture. According to Senior English CurriculumStandard(2003), the task of English teaching is to develop not only language knowledge andskill but cultural awareness. Intercultural communicative competence becomes one of themost important teaching aims. However, the intercultural communicative competence ofstudents in China is weak. It is obvious that the present domestic research on pragmaticfailure still focuses on the study on college students, the related studies on high schoolstudents are still rare. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on the investigation into pragmaticfailure produced by high school students. The study aims to investigate the present conditionof pragmatic failure produced by high school students. The study instruments includequestionnaires, literature and interview. The subjects of the study include130high schoolstudents in Zhangzhou. Through the data analysis, this study holds that high school studentsalways produce pragmatic failure. The main problems include: addresses, greetings,invitations, thanks and the response to apologies need to be improved. In addition, this studyholds that the reasons lie in the following aspects: the lack of cultural knowledge and realcontext of learning English, the negative transfer by Chinese.