Effect Of Cultural Introduction On English Learners’Pragmatic Competence:an Empirical Study

Cross-cultural communication requires English learners to master sufficient knowledge of target language and possess pragmatic competence. But in China, English teaching has long focused on forms of language, ignoring the improvement of English learners’pragmatic competence. The result is that most Chinese English learners can’t use English appropriately and freely. Pragmatic failure is a major factor to account for this phenomenon as it causes misunderstanding in the process of cross-cultural communication with native speakers. To help language learners reduce the pragmatic failures to a minimum, we need research into cross-cultural pragmatic failure deeply. Cultural knowledge is an indispensable part in English teaching. It is necessary to let students understand differences between English and Chinese cultures, to enhance their consciousness of intercultural communication, and to avoid pragmatic failures in intercultural communication.In recent years, based on J. Thomas’research, scholars from home and abroad got rich research achievements in this field, and provided useful information for foreign language teaching. In this paper, the researcher analyzed the phenomenon of pragmatic failures and put forward that strengthening cultural introduction in college English teaching can be effective to improve students’pragmatic competence. Two research questions are addressed:1. Whether cultural introduction teaching model is effective to improve students’pragmatic competence?2. Whether cultural introduction teaching model is effective to improve students’awareness of intercultural communication?The method in this research includes literature analysis, comparative experiment and questionnaire survey. The experimental subjects are60freshmen from nursing departments of Fenyang College Shanxi Medical University. Asemester-long empirical experiment is conducted in two classes. Culturalintroduction teaching method is adopted in the experimental class，while traditionalteaching method is adopted in the control class, respectively. Two classesrespectively had pre-test and post-test. The results of the questionnaire are analyzedby SPSS19.0. The results show:Firstly, cultural introduction teaching method improves the students’ pragmaticcompetence effectively. Before the experiment, the data of pre-test discovered thatthere was no significant difference of students’ pragmatic competence between twoclasses. After the experiment, the data of post-test showed that there existedsignificant difference between them. The performance of the experimental class issignificantly higher than that in control class.Secondly, cultural introduction teaching method effectively improves students’awareness of cross-cultural communication. Analysis of the classroom reflectionrecords and the data of tests indicates that strengthening cultural introduction notonly arouses college students’ interest in learning English, but also strengthens theirconsciousness of cross-cultural communication. In the questionnaire survey,93.4%students considered that cultural introduction teaching is better than the traditionalteaching mode, which mobilize their learning enthusiasm and initiative.