Enhancing Culture Teaching: From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Failure

For a long time in China, language teachers, influenced by the traditional teaching approaches, used to teach a foreign language with more emphasis on its linguistic forms than on its relation to its culture elements. As a result, many students experienced a sense of frustration and failure in communication with foreigners even if they received several years of formal English education and got good results in examinations. Such condition has been improved a lot recently through the common efforts of teachers on cultural introduction in foreign language teaching but, more often than not, the existence of problems in cross-cultural communication can still be discerned, which calls for further research and improvement in this field by teachers of foreign languages and linguists as well.After a lot of literature review and through an investigation of students' pragmatic competence in Yangzhou Education College, the author of this thesis has realized more clearly that the failure, known as pragmatic failure, is caused by ignorance of the target culture rather than linguistic errors. Thus, further researches need to be done and more emphasis should be laid on enhancing culture teaching in foreign language classes in order to avoid pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication.This thesis consists of six parts. Part One Introduction gives a brief description of this study. Part Two Literature Review discusses some basic concepts in this study and the relationship between each other, followed by the review of some related studies. Part Three is the part of research processes as well as methods, describing what this study aimed to investigate, who participated in this study, what kind of instruments were employed, and how data were collected and analyzed in order to answer the research questions. Part Four Results and Discussion reports the results of this study and presents the discussion of the possible factors that were responsible for these results at length. Part Five Summary of theInvestigation, summarizes the major findings of this study, points out its limitations, provides the implications for culture teaching and offers suggestions for future research. Part Six, Conclusion and Perspectives, involves the conclusion of the whole research process and results, how to improve students' cross-cultural awareness, how to deal with the cultural items in ELT, how to teach cultural items and how to create cross-cultural atmosphere.