A Study Of Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure And Junior English Teaching

This dissertation aims to indicate the necessity of culture input in English language teaching in middle school through the analysis of cross-cultural pragmatic failures. Chinese Junior students will be taken as a case to illustrate the importance of culture introduction in English language teaching for the improvement 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 the only goal of foreign language studying is just to master a series of grammatical rules and get high scores in examinations. As a result, most students have a good mastery of the linguistic knowledge of the target language, but they have weak pragmatic competence and communicative situations; what's more, they often break down the communication. Intercultural pragmatic failure occurs frequently.Many causes can result in cross-cultural pragmatic failure. However, the underlying reason for cross-cultural pragmatic failure is students' lack of the cultural knowledge of the target language. Students are lack of awareness of the differences of the target language and the native language. The goal of foreign language teaching is to develop students' communicative competence. Therefore, teachers should help students master the cultural knowledge of the target language as well as the linguistic knowledge. Culture teaching should be accompanied with English language teaching.Scanning the works and articles about cross-cultural pragmatic failure, we find that the subjects being investigated are almost all college students. As for Junior students, few concerns are shown to their cross-cultural pragmatic failure. In fact, the study of English learning in the period of foundation education is also an important field that should not be neglected. New course standard sets our teaching aims focusing on comprehensive usage of language ability so as to meet the communication needs of the country. However, English teachers usually pay more attention to linguistic competence than cross-cultural pragmatic competence. For this reason, I conduct an analysis on Junior school students' cross-cultural pragmatic failure. The ultimate purpose of the research is to discover the causes of cross-cultural pragmatic failure, identify a practical solution and improve the students' pragmatic competence.The dissertation consists of six chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion.In Chapter One, I mainly give a general picture of the current situation and present the account of the importance and necessity of culture input in Junior English language teaching. I interviewed 50 teachers and 300 students who came from 5 middle schools of Yingshan county. It presents the significance of the relationship between cross-cultural pragmatic failure and Junior English teaching.The theoretical support is given in Chapter Two. I mainly discuss Cross-cultural pragmatics and pragmatic failure. It is very important to avoid pragmatic failure in the course of forming pragmatic competence.Chapter Three is the design or research on cross-cultural communicative pragmatic failures of the students. At the same time, it shows that it is very important to introduce culture in Junior English language teaching to develop the students' cross-cultural communicative competence.In Chapter Four, I make a research and show how to improve the students' cross-cultural pragmatic competence.In Chapter Five, I have tried to find out the implications for Junior English teaching and make some tentative suggestions on avoiding pragmatic failure and improving students' pragmatic competence through introducing culture in language teaching.The conclusion summarizes this thesis in Chapter six.