Pragmatic Failure In Cross-cultural Communication And The Culture Teaching In Middle School English Education

The purpose of learning a language is for communication and to achieve this purpose, one must produce language that is not only grammatically correct, but also pragmatically appropriate, that is, confirming to the norms, which, in essence, is culture.After literature review and investigation of students' pragmatic competence and the situation of culture teaching in local schools, the improvement in students' pragmatic competence has been found out, but there remain some problems. Generally, the students' pragmatic competence is not good enough. Some culture elements still have been neglected, leading to the fact that some basic English expressions have not been well grasped. Most of the students are interested in culture learning but they do not pay enough attention to it because of various reasons. In this research, teachers' pragmatic competence is also investigated. Because of the lack of English culture and the lack of consciousness of cross-cultural communication, the teachers' pragmatic competence is limited too. On the basis of these investigations, this research focuses on how to strengthen the culture teaching for the purpose of improving the students' pragmatic competence and finds that: (1) Culture teaching in the classroom should be strengthened as well as the extra-curriculum activity. Teachers should explain to the students the culture elements which are hidden behind the language itself on the text book in the English class. Teachers should also apply various ways of doing so. One of the most important is to compare the Chinese and English culture. (2) Original research and individual study outside of the classroom is a good strategy to solve the problem of culture teaching in middle schools. (3) The English test should be innovated and more attention should be paid to the test of culture and pragmatic competence. (4) The teachers should improve their own pragmatic competence through building consciousness of cross-cultural communication and strengthening culture learning.In the end, through empirical research, this research proves that the above methods of culture teaching are feasible in improving the students' pragmatic competence in middle schools.