A Study On Junior Middle School English Teachers' Pragmatic Failure From The Perspective Of Cross-cultural Communication

Teacher discourse is a special kind of discourse which plays a significant role in cross-cultural communication.For junior middle school English teachers,their cultural awareness counts a great deal in junior middle school English teaching.As a matter of fact,despite good mastery of the regulations of English language,many junior middle school English teachers still fail to use the language appropriately or interpret it correctly.In terms of linguistic structure and communicative purpose,junior middle school English teachers are supposed to pay attention to the specific context in cross-cultural communication,which helps them establish harmonious interpersonal relationships and avoid pragmatic failures.In order to catch up with cross-cultural trend,The English Curriculum Standard for Chinese Junior Middle School(2011)points out that “junior middle school students are expected to communicate with foreigners in proper manners”,which sets up a new goal for junior middle school students,as well as for English teachers.As a matter of fact,it causes challenges for English teachers,and they are required to be equipped with higher teaching proficiency.In recent years,a large amount of junior middle school English teachers focus on linguistic systematic knowledge,such as grammar,vocabulary,sentence structure and so on.Helping students pass examinations is the ultimate goal for them,so they often ignore the improvement of pragmatic competence.In the study,two questions are to be discussed:(1)What are the common pragmatic failures made by junior middle school English teachers?(2)What are the influential factors that cause these pragmatic failures?Therefore,in order to find answers to these questions,the author carries out a study on junior middle school English teachers' pragmatic failures through questionnaire,test paper analysis and class-observation.The questionnaire includes two parts,questionnaires for teachers and questionnaires for students.The questionnaire items are designed to make an investigation on English teachers' pragmatic competence and failures in the daily classroom setting.Based on the questionnaires,the author chooses junior middle school English teachers and students as the subject.At last,the author collects the valid questionnaires and makes data analysis.In this study,some major findings are made: firstly,teachers' pragmatic failures are identified and categorized into three types,which are pragma-linguistic failure,socio-pragmatic failure and pragma-behavioral failure.Based on these categories,and along with the results of questionnaires and test papers,the author proposed some suggestions to reduce,or even eliminate pragmatic failures and improve teachers' pragmatic competence.First in pragma-linguistic competence,English teachers should integrate pragma-linguistic knowledge into discourse teaching,grammar teaching and vocabulary teaching.Secondly,in socio-pragmatic competence,teachers should develop cultural awareness and consciously integrate it into their teaching.At last,in pragma-behavioral competence,self-development and teaching techniques should be enhanced.