Intercultural Pragmatic Failure And ELT In China

Grammatical knowledge is traditionally viewed as the most important, even the onlyelement in English teaching. However, most students are not adaptive and cannot use Englishto communicate with the native speakers of English appropriately, though they have a largevocabulary and have a good command of the rules of grammar. D. Hymes (1964) believesthat linguistic theory is connected with language in use and integrated with theory ofcommunication and culture. He proposes the concept of communicative competence, pointingout that the competent communicator must have knowledge of how to use languageappropriately and effectively. He must know when and where to speak, what to talk about,and in what manner to speak. Based on Hymes' notion of communicative competence, Canaleand Swain (1980 1(1):1-47) have developed it and made it more influential.It is obvious that teachers should develop the students' communicative competence andtreat it as the goal of ELT. However, it is commonly acknowledged that Chinese Englishlearners have various kinds of problems in their oral English when they are encounteringnative speakers of English.This dissertation aims at investigating the students' accuracy and appropriateness inapplying English to real communication, to analyze the factors that influence the pragmaticcompetence level of college students and to try to find some ways to improve their Englishpragmatic competence. In addition, the dissertation also tends to expound the importance ofcultivating students' cultural awareness as well as cultural creativity in foreign languageteaching and learning.The dissertation consists of five chapters.Chapter one is introduction. The purpose of the paper and the research questions arepresented here. Chapter two is literature review. This Chapter mainly focuses on theBackground study of Pragmatic Failure, Intercultural Communication etc. The situation ofChinese English Language Teaching (ELT) has been demonstrated. Moreover, this chapteralso tries to list some major problems of English Language Teaching (ELT) in China. Byusing questionnaires, this dissertation attempts to test Chinese College students' pragmaticcompetence with the purpose of finding possible ways in reducing students' pragmatic failure.Chapter three presents the whole study of the two questionnaires including data collection,data analysis and discussion. Chapter four presents the implications for English teaching inChina, for example, integrating language with culture, developing students' culturalawareness and creativity, etc. Chapter five concludes the dissertation with a brief summary.