A Study Of Intercultural Pragmatic Failure And Necessary Culture Input In English Language Teaching (ELT)

This dissertation aims to indicate the necessity of culture input in English language teachingthrough the analysis of intercultural pragmatic failures. Chinese students will be taken as acase to illustrate the importance of culture introduction in English language teaching for theimprovement of their communicative competence.Traditional Chinese teaching is grammar-oriented, and the classroom is teacher-centered,focusing on the teaching of the linguistic knowledge of the target language. It seems that theonly goal of foreign language studying is just to master a series of grammatical rules and gethigh scores in examinations. As a result, most students have a good mastery of the linguisticknowledge of the target language, but they have weak pragmatic competence andcommunicative competence. Therefore, they cannot make effective communications in realcommunicative situations;even they often break down the communication. Interculturalpragmatic failure occurs frequently.Many causes can result in intercultural pragmatic failure. However, the underlying reason forintercultural pragmatic failure is students' lack of the cultural knowledge of the targetlanguage. It's also an essential reason for their weak communicative competence. Thisdissertation analyzes the causes of intercultural pragmatic failure in details. At the same time,the thesis gives some suggestions on how to improve students' intercultural communicativecompetence. In foreign language teaching, a better way to develop students' communicativecompetence might be adopt a communicative approach. Some specific ways will be proposedin the dissertation.To sum up, the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to develop students'communicative competence. Therefore, teachers should help students master the culturalknowledge of the target language as well as the linguistic knowledge. In fact, language is apart of culture, a reflection of culture, and culture has an great influence on language. Hence,culture teaching should be accompanied with English language teaching. In this dissertation,the relationships between culture, language and communication are clearly explained, to showthe necessity of culture teaching in English language teaching.