An Empirical Research On Culture Teaching Strategies For Correcting College Students' Pragmatic Failure

The concept of pragmatic failure, first introduced by Jenny Thomas, refers to that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication break down. It occurs whenever a person fails to understand the culture different from his own in communication. Pragmatic failure is invariably worse than grammatical mistakes as in interacting with foreign language learners, native speakers tend to be rather tolerant of errors in pronunciation or syntax. In contrast, violations of speaking rules are often interpreted as bad manners since the native speaker is unlikely to be aware of sociolinguistic relativity.English, as a Lingua Franca, plays an increasingly important role in international communication and has maintained its position as the most widely used foreign language. Its role will be further strengthened as China's impact will be felt in more fields in international arena. However, because of less emphasis on culture teaching in the past, foreign language learners in China frequently produce pragmatic failure when they communicate with native speakers. In order to grope for some solutions to this problem, the thesis tends to probe how to take some effective measures to improve the students'pragmatic competence and offer some suggestions on culture teaching.The thesis aims at revealing the relationship between pragmatic failure and culture teaching through research. Two groups of students were chosen for the test and then data were collected and analyzed. Four research questions are designed and addressed: 1) What are phenomena of pragmatic failure when Chinese students learn English or communicate with native speakers? 2) What are reasons about pragmatic failures when Chinese students learn English or communicate with native speakers? 3) When culture teaching added into teaching process, how much the pragmatic competence of learners can be improved? 4) What are culture teaching strategies on correcting college students'pragmatic failure?Results show that the college students who have received culture teaching fail less pragmatically than those who are only given linguistic teaching: conscious cultivation of the students'culture awareness can be one practical way of reducing pragmatic failure. Based on the results of the research, the thesis proposes that linguistic teaching should be combined with culture teaching and stress should be laid on teaching methods, teachers and learners. Teachers are facilitators of culture teaching: learners are receivers of cultural learning; and teaching methods are approaches for culture teaching. They should be integrated as each of them plays a very important role in culture teaching. Foreign language teachers should bring the roles of these three factors into full play in culture teaching so as to improve the students'pragmatic competence.The experiment of culture teaching has some implications for English language teaching. Firstly, the research shows that culture teaching is a necessity for improving students'pragmatic competence. Secondly, the research demonstrates that culture teaching in the language classroom can be conducive to the cultivation of the students'culture awareness. Thirdly, the combination of teaching methods, teachers and learners boost the development of the students'culture awareness and advance their pragmatic competence.