Pragmatic Failure of College Students in Cross-Cultural Communication

Pragmatic failure has been one of the main topics in pragmatics, second language acquisition, and other related research fields for many years. It reflects a deficit in pragmatic knowledge and is widely considered a hindrance to successful cross-cultural communication. Notably, proficiency in English as a learner does not equate to proficiency as a communicator, this is especially true for college students because although most of them have a good mastery of English grammar and vocabulary knowledge through a large amount of training and practice, they may still probably lack good communicative competence and inevitably encounter all kinds of pragmatic errors, which will cause embarrassment and misunderstandings in the process of real communication. Since developing students’ proficiency in cross-cultural communication is the purpose of college English teaching, it’s necessary for English teachers to pay more attention to help them avoid pragmatic failure so as to develop more fluent and successful communication with others of different social and cultural backgrounds. This paper first analyzes the pragmatic errors that college English learners tend to commit in cross-cultural communication. Then, it further discusses the factors leading to the occurrence of pragmatic errors and provides suggestions for college English teaching. It is hoped that these suggestions can help college English learners avoid pragmatic failure as much as possible and develop their communicative competence.