Abstract: English has developed into a lingua franca in such domains as politics, economy, society, culture, and education today. Existing research on English as a lingua franca (ELF), however, has been focused primarily on issues like phonetic features, vocabulary and grammar, conversational structures, conversational strategies and so on, with little attention paid to the issue of pragmatic failure in the context of communication in English as a lingua franca. In view of this, this paper presents a new definition of pragmatic failure, pointing out the pragmatic norms appropriate to the communication among native speakers of English is not suitable for that in the ELF context. Then, the authors discuss its major types and conclude by providing several proposals on pragmatic teaching in the context of English as a lingua franca.