A Study On Non-English Major Students' Pragmatic Competence And Approaches To Culture Teaching

With the development of science and technology, communication and cooperation between nations become more and more frequent. Foreign language plays an important role in modern society. One of the aims of foreign language education is to develop communicative competence. Communicative competence includes linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Linguistic competence deals with the level of phonology, lexicon, and grammar, but pragmatic competence is the ability to use a target language in a tacit and appropriate way. However, culture teaching in college is not adequately emphasized for a long time. It is observed that pragmatic failures caused by cultural differences often hinder effective cross-cultural communication. To grope for some solutions to this problem, the thesis tends to probe how to take some effective measures to improve students' pragmatic competence and offer some suggestions on culture teaching.Research on pragmatic competence has been gradually paid attention to in the field. However, related empirical studies are evidently inadequate in contrast to its theoretical studies. With two classes of non-English major students as the subjects, this thesis investigates college English learners' pragmatic competence and its relevance to culture teaching through pragmatic tests. The results show that the non-English major students who have received cultural teaching are more pragmatically competent than those who are only given linguistic teaching; conscious cultivation of the students' cultural awareness can be one practical way of reducing pragmatic failures. Based on the discussion and analysis of the pragmatic mistakes, the author proposes some practical ways of developing students' pragmatic competence, such as raising students' cultural awareness, introducing some pragmatic principles, improving teaching method, integrating culture into the teaching of vocabulary and grammar and five language skills: speaking, listening, reading, writing and translation as well as teaching culture through internet.The findings of the experiment show that culture teaching is necessary, feasible and effective to improve students' pragmatic competence. Only by learning cultural differences can students develop their culture awareness and advance pragmatic competence. The writer believes that this thesis provides some pedagogical instructions for college English teaching in China.