A Study On Senior High School Students' English Intercultural Pragmatic Competence And English Intercultural Pragmatic Failure

With the development of English teaching in China,more and more scholars find that English learners should use English not only correctly but also appropriately,and that the appropriateness of language performance is closely related to culture.Therefore,many researchers focus their attention on English learners' intercultural pragmatic competence and culture teaching in English classes.Based on "Effect Theory"put forward by Lin Dajin and Xie Chaoqun,the paper attempts to answer the following four questions:1)What is the overall level of senior high school students'English intercultural pragmatic competence?2)What is the relation between senior high school students'English language proficiency and their intercultural pragmatic competence?3)In what aspects do senior high school students tend to be pragmatically incompetent?4)What are the causes of senior high school students'English intercultural pragmatic failure?To answer these questions,141 senior high school students from Fujian Dongshan No.2 Secondary School are chosen as subjects,and three methods are employed in the research:questionnaire,interview and classroom observation.The results are as follows:1)Senior high school students'English intercultural pragmatic competence is lower than expected.2)In terms of the average scores of the three grades,students'English intercultural pragmatic competence improves with the improvement of their English language proficiency.However,in terms of the results in the part of nonverbal communication,oral communication and written communication,students'English language proficiency and intercultural pragmatic competence do not develop at an equal rate.Significant differences are found among the three grades in written communication,but not in nonverbal communication or oral communication.3)In terms of nonverbal communication,students have poor mastery of the differences about time,space and body language between Chinese culture and English culture.As for oral communication,students do badly in the aspects of salutation,introduction,greeting,acknowledgement,taboo,request,invitation,farewell and concern.In terms of written communication,students have poor mastery of color words,sentence subject,discourse and voice.4)The intercultural pragmatic failure results from lack of understanding of differences between Chinese culture and English culture.This research is instructive to culture teaching in English classes.It presents how cultural differences cause intercultural pragmatic failure,and makes English teachers and learners realize the importance of culture in English learning.What's more,the teaching suggestions mentioned in this paper can help senior high school English teachers to find intercultural pragmatic materials in their textbooks and integrate English language teaching with culture teaching so as to improve students'intercultural pragmatic awareness and reduce their intercultural pragmatic failures.