A Study Of Intercultural Pragmatic Failure In Junior English Teaching

As for most of people, because of limited conditions, their ability of interculturalcommunication is mainly acquired in the English lessons. However, the traditional Englishteaching in China only focuses on the acquisition of language skills. Students’ ability ofcommunication is often ignored, with teaching of English culture omitted. So after years ofEnglish learning in primary schools and junior schools, students can only handle some writtenEnglish questions, but can not communicate properly in target language. They always makemistakes and cause misunderstandings.In order to solve this problem in English teaching, the writer of this thesis makes anexperiment on it. This essay is based on the theory of pragmatic failure by Jenny Thomas, aswell as those studies by Ziran He and Wenzhong Hu on the pragmatic failure. The students inClass(13) and Class(14)of Zhang Zhou Experimental School are selected as experimentalexaminees. Analysis is made on their performances in English communication to find out thereasons of their pragmatic failure. On this purpose, two surveys have been made to investigatethe phenomenon and the results. The first survey is made before experiment of cultureteaching. The second is after a semester’s culture teaching, so as to compare the results of thetwo surveys. The suggestion of integrating culture teaching in English language teaching hasbeen made.It is found that culture teaching in language teaching is necessary if we want to improvestudents’ communication abilities. Only we put in culture teaching in class language teaching,students’ communication abilities can be improved, thus, we can limit studentscommunication failures to the least. Of cause, if we want to do it well, we should develop theteachers’ culture knowledge first.