Non-English Majors' Pragmatic Failure And Its Countermeasures In Cultural Teaching

The term "pragmatic failure" was first employed in 1983 by Jenny Thomas, a British linguist, to define the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. It occurs whenever a communicator cannot use language appropriately or interpret language correctly. Research shows the main cause of pragmatic failure is lack of knowledge of cultural differences. With more and more closer international communication, it has become one of the main sources that give rise to intercultural communication breakdown.Nowadays English is becoming more and more important as a main communicating medium that links China with other countries. And teachers of English should regard cultivating students' intercultural communicative competence as the ultimate goal to meet the requirements of the increasingly interdependent world. However, the present college English teaching pays more attention to linguistic forms rather than the proper language use. Such a depressing situation has resulted in poor command of Western cultures on the part of students and their frequent committing of pragmatic failures. Considering this, the thesis aims to probe how to take some effective countermeasures to solve this problem through cultural teaching.The present thesis first reviews the domestic and foreign related studies on pragmatic failures and points out the importance of cultural teaching. Based on the previous research and the consideration of teaching practice, the thesis then proposes incorporating cultural teaching into English language teaching, attaching more importance to teaching methods, teachers and learners and synthesizing them organically in cultural teaching. In addition, the thesis also puts forward some suggestions for teaching materials and assessment system that are considered to have influences on the improvement of students' pragmatic competence. At last, a one-year' experiment of cultural teaching verifies the effectiveness and the feasibility of the methods-teachers-learners-centered teaching strategies. What is more, the implications for English language teaching are also discussed in the thesis.The originality of the thesis lies in the stress on the organic synthesis of teaching...