CROSS-CULTURAL PRAGMATIC FAILURE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

"Perhaps the fascination that the study of cross-cultural pragmatics holds for language teachers, researchers, and students of linguistics stems from the serious trouble to which pragmatic failure can lead. No "error " of grammar can make a speaker seem so incompetent, so inappropriate, so foreign, as the kind of trouble a learner gets into when he or she doesn't understand or otherwise disregards a language's rules of use " (Rintell-Mitchell, 1989, cited in Trosborg 1994, p. 3)