An Investigation On The Teaching Of English Culture In Senior Middle School From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Under the development of the economic globalization, the communication between different cultures is becoming more and more important. Learning English as a communicative tool of China is becoming increasingly popular. To some extent, the goal of English teaching is to foster cross-cultural and/or communicative talents. In order to communicate successfully, one not only has to make his words grammatically right, but also has to follow the rules of the societal culture in which the language is used. However, influenced by the traditional teaching approach and testing system, the teachers of English in China generally pay more attention to the language itself and ignore the usage of language in special context. As a result, the students often make pragmatic mistakes in cross-cultural communication owing to culture differences, and this finally leads to the failure of the cross-cultural communication. As culture has a close relationship with language, it is necessary to explore the teaching methods of improving the students’ pragmatic ability.This paper attempts to answer the following three questions:1) what is the current stage of the high school students’ and teachers’ pragmatic competence?2) what is the current situation of the high school students’cultural learning and their teachers’ teaching?3) what are the probably most effective cultural teaching strategies and practices from the perspective of pragmatics?To answer these questions, two methods are employed in this research:testing and questionnaire. The testing is supposed to examine the present stage of high school students’ and teachers’pragmatic competence while the questionnaire aims to investigate the high school students’ cultural learning situation and the high school teachers’ cultural teaching situation. The research objects are senior students enrolled in international class from Nanjing Foreign Language School Xianlin Campus. There are46students in Group One from Grade One and54students in Group Two from Grade Two.15senior high school teachers from this school are selected randomly from this school.The result shows:1) the high school students’pragmatic competence level isn’t high and there are many kinds of pragmatic failure in communication.2) most high school students can realize the close relationship between language and culture, but they are not satisfied with the current cultural teaching.3) English teachers’ pragmatic competence level varies greatly.4) most teachers have realized the necessity of teaching culture, but its implementation has been influenced by such factors as the teachers’ quality, teaching task time and teaching resources.In the thesis, the author proposes four suggestions for high school English cultural teaching from the perspective of pragmatics. They are:1) to improve the students’ pragma-linguistic competence.2) to improve the students’ social-pragmatic competence.3) to enhance the quality of the teachers.4) to use the modern science and technology in language class.Finally, the author also discusses the limitations and prospects of this study.