Author(s)

Xiaoning Wang

Corresponding Author

Xiaoning Wang

ABSTRACT

Pragmatic competence, as a concept, has been widely recognized in language teaching in recent years. And acquiring pragmatic competence is one of the important goals of language teaching and learning. This thesis is to investigate the pragmatic failures in apology-making speech act committed by Chinese college EFL students. The discussion of the findings indicates that the causes accounting for the pragmatic failures are cultural differences, negative pragmatic transfer and inappropriate language input. Analysis of the behaviors of apology of Chinese college EFL students can give pedagogical implication for our college English teaching aiming at promoting communicative competence, such as teachers need to use the materials as authentic as possible, introduce pragmatic knowledge about target language when teaching linguistic knowledge. What’s more, the training of teachers should be emphasized. If students can interact with such kind of input under the proper guidance of teachers, they may become more sensitive in interpreting different speech acts.

KEYWORDS

Interlanguage pragmatics, pragmatic failure, apology speech act, causes of pragmatic failure