Cultural Transfer And Pragmatic Failure In Intercultural Communication: EFL Teaching And Learning In China

Nowadays, the sense of "Global Village" and the globalization of economy have necessitated intercultural communication, which makes great demands on not only good linguistic competence, but also sound knowledge of the similarities and divergences between different cultures and the flexible application of such knowledge. By analyzing the internal relations between cultural difference and pragmatic failure, the dissertation points out that cultural transfer derived from cultural divergence is one of the most important factors contributing to pragmatic failure in intercultural communication.It is firmly held that the contraction of time and space does not necessarily mean the automatic disappearance of psychological distance between different people, even if they share the same language. The reason for this is that language, as one of the various codes in people's daily contact, is only one part of culture system.Moreover, language and culture are interrelated in innumerable ways, which makes it inevitable that the divergence between people in culture orientation, value perspectives, social norms, religious beliefs and modes of thinking often leads to their difference in such aspects as coding and decoding process, verbal and non-verbal behavior, regular patterns of language use as well as discourse structure.Since people have naturally acquired their native culture in the course of growth and education, they more often than not unconsciously use their native cultural principles, social norms and social linguistic regulations to judge and interpret other side's linguistic behavior while they are communicating with people from different cultural background. This unavoidably contributes to communicative pragmatic failure, which can be divided into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Among factors resulting in pragmatic failure, cultural transfer arisen from cultural divergence is one of the greatest significance. Usually, cultural transfer is embodied in two aspects: surface-structure transfer (mainly involving material culture and system culture) and deep-structure transfer (mainly concerning psychological-gradation culture values), both of which are responsible for pragmatic failure in intercultural communication. The former one is explicit and can be overcome by learning and comparing; while the latter is implicit and not easily perceived, and thus more difficult to conquer, which often causes serious communicative barriers and failure.Therefore, in order to help foreign language learners acquire sound linguistic and communicative competence, and participate in international communication flexibly and properly, EFL teaching in China must put an emphasis on culture teaching, and cultivate learners' strong cultural awareness and creativity.