Cultural Teaching In EFLT: A Pragmatic Perspective

Nowadays, the importance of culture teaching in EFLT has been widely recognized and great achievements have been made in cultural studies. However, culture teaching at college level is not adequately emphasized. For a long time, teachers and learners tend to stress the training and cultivation of linguistic competence while paying less attention to pragmatic competence, which leads to an imbalance between the two. The ultimate goal of learning a foreign language is to communicate in that language. However, an individual's ability to communicate effectively is not solely dependent on his or her linguistic competence but also includes the non-native speaker's ability to use the language appropriately in different situations. Therefore, to attain the ultimate goal of culture teaching, pragmatic competence development is indispensable.With totally one hundred first-year and third-year non-English majors in Weifang University as the subjects, this thesis attempts to investigate college English learners'pragmatic competence and its relevance to linguistic competence through a pragmatic test. Besides, the pragmatic mistakes made by the subjects during the test are brought to a detailed case study, trying to figure out the deficiencies of their pragmatic competence in the hope of future improvement. Based on the empirical study, the thesis is expected to shed some light on culture teaching in EFLT, especially at college level.According to the statistical analysis of the data, the overall level of college English learners'pragmatic competence is lower than expected and there is little evidence of improvement across the two groups of learners. This result indicates that linguistic competence does not guarantee pragmatic competence and there should be some improvement in culture teaching at college level. Based on the author's own teaching experience, suggestions are given on how to develop students'pragmatic competence. Since pragmatic competence can be divided into pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence, the relevant teaching should start from these two angles. For example, pragmalinguistic principles can be incorporated into the teaching of grammar and vocabulary and sociopragmatic development can be realized through the teaching and learning of cultural knowledge.The innovations of this thesis may be found in two aspects: first, since the cultivation of college English learners'pragmatic competence has been neglected for a long time, theoretical discussions of it may make a little contribution to relevant studies; second, the present study analyzes college English learners'pragmatic incompetence from both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic perspectives, and suggests to teach culture correspondingly from these two angles, hence providing positive guidance to the current teaching practice.However, owing to limitations in the available references and the author's academic faculty, the exploration in this thesis concerning the relationship between specific cultural contents and pragmatic competence development only scratches the surface. Further studies still need to be undertaken to deepen our understanding of the topic in question, and perfect culture teaching and learning.