Foreign Language Cultural Language Teaching And Research

As a newly-established linguistic research subject and a pragmatic research branch with Chinese culture as its background, Chinese cultural pragmatics builds itself on the bases of the development of the pragmatic theories. Some scholars have already devoted themselves into this research field in these years. For the present, the research works are mainly aiming at the description of the characteristics and strategies of the subject. And the research works haven't be paid much attention to its practical usages. This paper tries to investigate the Chinese pragmatic competence of the overseas students, by focusing on the teaching of Chinese to international students. And this paper gives some useful suggestions to help further cultivate and improve the international students' pragmatic competence.By explaining the basic spirit of Chinese culture and the communicative features growing out of it, this paper first does some research about the characteristics and resources of Chinese cultural pragmaitcs. The cultural factors reflected by Chinese pragmatics system are analyzed. And then, this paper describes the stable, profounded cultural expressions formed by the long-streching accumulation of the Chinese vocabulary, and confirms that the cultural factors have significent influence upon Chinese pragmatics system. And therefore, it makes clear that students should be taught from the related Chinese cultural pragmatic features and vocabulary teaching, owing to speciality of Chinese nationality and Chinese features of the pragmatic instruments.While teaching Chinese as a foreign language focuses its attention on the cultivation of the students'Chinese pragmatic competence.The particular spirits of Chinese culture have endowed Chinese language with its special pragmatic rules and features.So in the language communication of Chinese, there are always some different pragmatic rules and featues should be noticed. In Chinese expressions, there are often very rich and complicated cultural information or meanings. Under certain conditions, they can not be fully understood by overseas students according to their limited contextual knowledge of the language, especially, in effectively apprehending the speaker's intentions. So the urgent subject of teaching Chinese to foreign students, which whether can effectively help the students use the language to understand the comprehensive differences by their different levels, should be analyzed now. And also should explore the traces of the develolpment of their cultural pragmatic competence. So, considering the above factors, this paper carefully designed a questionaire especially to survey and investigated Chinese cultural pragmatic competence of the overseas students. As culture has been pointed as the foothold of the survey and analysis, the questionaire has mainly done the investigation about the medium and higher level overseas students'cultlural pragmatic competence in their understanding, from the Chinese cultural vocalubary and Chinese cultural pragmatic characteristics aspects.The results of the survey are as following. (1)There are some obvious differences of cultural pragmatic competence between the learners of intermediate level and senior level. This can tell that both the levels do improve as the learning periods get longer. However, in some respects, these two groups don't show the significant differences. And the interests here are that their cultural pragmatic competence does not go along together with the increasing of their knowledge about the Chinese language. And something even more interesting is that the survey shows that the intermediate level group does better than the higher level group in some cultural pragmatic survey. (2)The overseas students'mother languages have great influence upo(?) the making of the students'cultural pragmatic competence. The students from Japan and Korea show better performances in the programms of cultural pragmatics, meanwhile, the students from the Western countries themselves have such differences between them.For examples, Italian students have very strong mother cultural consciousness which make their Chinese cultural pragmatic competence lower than their parnters from American and Canada who do really better. (3) In the cultural vocabulary part, although the performances of the seniorer level group are better than that of the intermediate group, the both groups show poor performances in their cultural vocabulary learning.The survey can be concluded that the low level cultural pragmatic competence is the key reason for the overseas students'pragmatic competence's improving. And the contribution of our current culture teaching to develop the student's culture pragmatics should be complemented. The suggestion is that some special kinds of teaching about the Chinese cultural vocabulary and Chinese pragmatic characteristics should be given to the overseas students.Such kind of teaching can not be thought as simple cultural teaching or language training drills. Whereas it needs some combination of teaching cultural background together with the explanations of the pragmatic features under it, and combines the cultural introduction with building of the students'pragmatic competence.This means that the explanations of the cultural factors need to be given together with the description of the relationship between the factors and the pragmatic competence. And drills and practice of such items should be organized so as to help the overseas students make clear about the common Chinese cultural features and the special usages caused by such features. Therefore this paper considers that the principles of teaching of cultural pragmatics should observe firmly three points, which are as following. (1) The teaching materials should be accurate, practical and up-to-date; (2) the teaching should be given step by step; (3) the students should be divided into classes reasonably and effectively. With these principles, the special cultural pragmatics courses, which focus on the Chinese cultural vocabulary property, Chinese cultural pragmatic property and the Chinese cultural values, should be offered. And this paper suggests that the teaching of Chinese cultural pragmatics can be implemented in three ways. Explain the Chinese pragmatic rules together with the teaching of some cultural expressions; introduce the knowledge of the Chinese pragmatics together with the teaching of the pattern drills; teaching can be given by contrasting the mother culture and the target culture.