The Study On Functions Of Cultural Teaching In The English Pragmatic Competence Training Of Senior High School

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the cultural teaching and culture teaching strategies affectChinese high school students’ pragmatic competence. In China, along with the increase in the communicationwith foreigners, people gradually found that pure language teaching which is lack of cultural teaching can notmeet the needs of the students’ cross-cultural communication. Many scholars made some wide range ofdiscussions on the importance of culture teaching and the principles and methods of the concreteimplementation. But most of these studies were in view of the university foreign language learners. However, itwas weak for the cultural teaching of the middle school English classroom teaching as well as culture teachingstrategy research. Based on the study of relevant literature and combing with the survey and experimentalresearch, the author put forward two research questions as follows for study:(1) Will the culture teachingstrategies have positive effects on enhancing EFL learners’ pragmatic competence?(2) Which cultural teachingmethod is more effective in cultural teaching of senior high school?In2012, the ministry of education issued the latest "high school English curriculum standard"(newstandard) which clearly cultivated the students’ cultural awareness as one of the five basic goal of Englishteaching. Although high school English teachers and learners are aware of the importance of culture teaching,the current English culture teaching still has many problems. From an investigation of the current culturalteaching present situation in a high school of Baiyin, the author found that teachers and students all have apositive attitude for English cultural teaching, and they thought the current English culture teaching can’t meetthe need of students’ cultural awareness and communicative competence. Meanwhile, the lack of effectiveculture teaching strategies and methods of the system is the main reason for the problem caused by the currentculture teaching. Therefore, in this paper, the author selected two classes in a high school of BAiYin for4months of culture teaching experiments, and the author hopes that through empirical research to prove thatculture teaching strategies affects learners’ pragmatic competence. In the process of experiment, the teacher helpsstudents to absorb the cultural information and cultivate cultural awareness through the use of the system andeffective culture teaching strategies in experimental classes, while the regular English teaching is used in thecontrol class. In the late stage of the experiment, the author uses the “pragmatic competence testing" revised byLai Yisheng to test the pragmatic competence of experimental class and control class at the same time. Resultsshow that experimental class’s pragmatic competence is significantly higher than the control class’s. Accordingto the experimental data and other research, the author finds that system and effective culture teaching strategies can improve students’ pragmatic competence. At the end of the paper, the author proposed some effectivecultural teaching strategies.