Abstract This paper analyzes the main reasons of the common cross-cultural pragmatic failures of high school students through a case study, in which 45 students participated a test of pragmatic failure. This paper classifies and describes the types of pragmatic failures according to the data collected. The reason analysis of the pragmatic failures are based on the answers to the test questions and the focus interview of the students. Therefore, five main reasons are generalized, including negative cultural transfer, lack of pragmatic knowledge, unclear context misjudgment of social relationship, exceeding politeness, and focusing only on literal meaning. In the end, this paper put forward three suggestions to improve the pragmatic competence of the high school students.61412

Keywords: pragmatic failure；case study; classification; causes; high school students

摘要本文对中学生常犯的跨文化语用失误的原因进行分析。通过个案研究，高中某班级45名学生参加语用失误测试。根据收集上来的数据，对语用失误进行分类和描写，并组织焦点访谈对语用失误的主要原因进行了分析，包括母语文化负迁移、缺少语用常识、语境不明、社会关系误判、过度礼貌、只看字面意义等原因。依此，本文提出了三点建议以提高中学生跨文化语用能力。

毕业论文关键词：语用失误；个案研究；分类；原因；高中生

Contents

1. Introduction 1

1.1.Study Background 1

1.2.Importance of This Study 2

1.3.Structure of This Study 2

2. Literature Review 3

2.1 The definition of pragmatic failure 3

2.2 The types of pragmatic failure 3

2.3 Related research. 4

3. Methodology 5

3.1.Research Questions 5

3.2.Participants 6

3.3.Instrument 6

4. Data Description 6

5. Findings and Discussion 8

5.1 Negative Cultural Transfer 8

5.2.Lack of Pragmatic Knowledge 9

5.3. Unclear Context 9

5.4.Misjudgement on Social Relation 10

5.5.Literal Meaning 11

5.6.Excessive Politeness 11

6.Suggestions 12

6.1Making Students Aware of Cultural Difference 12

6.2 Giving Guidance on Pragmatic Knowledge 12

6.3 Providing an Environment of Interactive atmosphere 13

7. Conclusion 13

8. Appendix

1. Introduction

To obtain the real situation of English pragmatic failure of high school students, a case study is used to investigate different reasons of pragmatic failure in different classification. Senior 1 Class 4 students of Gongdao middle school in Yangzhou was chosen at random as a case. Study background was described in this chapter firstly. Following this, it goes on to the  importance of this study. In the last part, the structure of this paper are supposed to be summarized.

1.1.Study Background

In China, English as a school subject is becoming increasingly more important. There is a increasing tendency that students are attracted to foreign countries to further their study. Although they can understand the literal meaning of utterances when confronted with authentic communication situations, it’s not easy to interpret the meanings correctly, or get their ideas across. Students may fail in their communication due to their errors in syntax, or their inaccurate pronunciation in the target language, but the main cause should be attached to pragmatic incompetence. That is to say, they may be lack of the ability to utilize a language to get a certain aim or to make out what a person say in a assigned context.文献综述