Pragmatic Competence And Culture Teaching

In foreign language teaching world there is a consensus that one ofthe aims of foreign language education is to develop students'communicative competence, and that teacher should teach culturesimultaneously when teaching language itself. According to Widdowson(1989), communicative competence includes two aspects: linguisticcompetence and pragmatic competence. Linguistic competence ismade up of three components—phonology, lexicon, and grammar, butpragmatic competence, another important component of communicativecompetence, is the ability to use a target language in a tacit andappropriate way. As for linguistic competence, Chinese teachers ofEnglish have paid much attention to it in teaching program, whilepragmatic competence has been almost neglected in language teaching.Some researchers reveal that the pragmatic competence of the Chineselearners is much poorer than their linguistic competence. It is observedthat pragmatic failures mainly caused by cultural differences oftenhinder effective cross-cultural communication. Pragmatic failures, theindication of lower pragmatic competence, may lead tomisunderstanding, and even other participants may attribute it to one'sinner quality and character, and hence regard it as an offence. AsWolfson ever says: "In interacting with foreigners, native speakers tendto be rather tolerant of errors in pronunciation or syntax, in contrast,violations of rules of speaking are often interpreted as bad mannerssince the native speaker is unlikely to be aware of sociolinguisticrelativity" (Qi Yucun, 1994:19). Therefore, successful cultivation offoreign language learners' communicative competence will, to somedegree, depend on whether it could effectively bring about learners'development of pragmatic competence.In order to explore effective ways of developing students'pragmatic competence, the author conducts experiments on her twoclasses in 2002 and in 2004, and data gained from the test shows thatthe students' pragmatic competence in 2002 is on a poor level and afterthe author's two years of emphasizing both pragmatic knowledge andcultural knowledge in English teaching, students' pragmaticcompetence has been improved. As to the pragmalinguistic andsociopragmatic competence, we conclude that the students are morepragmalinguistically competent, and less sociopragmatic competent.Thus, cultural elements should be further strengthened. The present dataalso shows that the growth of their pragmatic competence is not in pacewith that of their linguistic competence, which further confirms someresearchers' findings. So in order to develop students' communicativecompetence, we should pay attention to developing their pragmaticcompetence while developing linguistic competence.According to the results of the test, the author analyzes possiblecauses of pragmatic failure. In her interpretation, pragmatic failure iscaused by improper teaching, inappropriate pragmalinguistictransference in learning, conflict of cultural socio-linguistic rules, andcultural conflict of values.On the basis of the discussion and analysis of the unsatisfactoryaspects of teaching in nowadays Chinese college English classroom andthe causes of pragmatic failure, the author tries to propose somepractical ways of developing students' pragmatic competence, such asstrengthening English output, developing students' pragmatic awareness,integrating cultural components into language teaching.Although developing pragmatic competence in English teachingclass takes up the normal teaching time, it contributes to reaching theteaching aim to communicate successfully.