1.1 Research Background 研究背景

With the development of globalization, more and more people start to consider the ability to speak English as a necessary skill. In China, most children begin to learn English since primary school. Adults also attmpt to improve their english abilities in order to be competitive in society. Everyone wants to learn English as early as possible so that they can communicate with native speakers with ease in the future. Even though the cross-cultural communication attracts more and more attention,as the increasingly frequent communication between countries on politics, culture, science and technology and trade exchanges,we should notice that errors,contradictions and conflicts are gradually revealed in the process of cross-cultural communication because of the different cultural concepts. Ways of thinking, the huge barriers of values often cause the communication failure. People with different cultural backgrounds often encounter misunderstanding between each other even though they find little difficulties in understanding the literal meaning of their utterances.Such miscommunication often happens, not because of the non-native speakers’grammatical incompetence as revealed in their inaccurate pronunciation or grammatical mistakes of the target language,but because of their pragmatic incompetence,which is called pragmatic failure as distinguished from grammatical error. Therefore,pragmatic failure,which causes communication breakdown,has become more and more worthy of attention in cross-culture communication.

1.2 Research Significance 研究的目的及意义

The study on the pragmatic failure plays an indispensible role in the Cross-cultural Communication and English teaching. Eventhough it is a hot issue in academia, we need to discuss it further since there are still many shortcomings. This article will briefly introduce the phenomenon of pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication,elaborate the pragmatic failure from the background of culture and intercultural communication, review the domestic and foreign studies of pragmatic failures by using comparative methods and summarize their achievements and find out the limitations.

Through the questionnaire and detailed analysis of the results, it will answer the following questions: First, what is the level of college students' pragmatic competence? Second, What are the problems of English teaching in training students' pragmatic competence? Third, what are the reasons of pragmatic failure? What is the effect taken by negotiation strategy?Then the paper put forward some countermeasures to improve the method of teaching, which may benefit the improvement of college students' pragmatic competence and English level.