Teaching English as a foreign language is not tantamount to elaborating on syntactic structures or learning new vocabulary and expressions, but should incorporate some cultural elements which are intertwined with the ...Teaching English as a foreign language is not tantamount to elaborating on syntactic structures or learning new vocabulary and expressions, but should incorporate some cultural elements which are intertwined with the language itself. The main premise of the paper is that effective communication is more than a matter of linguistic proficiency and the learner's pragmatic competence is more or less arrested by the negative cultural transfer from the mother tongue, and based on that premise, the paper analyses the reasons behind negative cultural transfer from the lexical dimension, the speech act dimension, and the psychological dimension, and concludes with a tripartite toolkit of alleviating principles respectively corresponding to the classroom instruction, the teachers, and the students.展开更多
文摘Teaching English as a foreign language is not tantamount to elaborating on syntactic structures or learning new vocabulary and expressions, but should incorporate some cultural elements which are intertwined with the language itself. The main premise of the paper is that effective communication is more than a matter of linguistic proficiency and the learner's pragmatic competence is more or less arrested by the negative cultural transfer from the mother tongue, and based on that premise, the paper analyses the reasons behind negative cultural transfer from the lexical dimension, the speech act dimension, and the psychological dimension, and concludes with a tripartite toolkit of alleviating principles respectively corresponding to the classroom instruction, the teachers, and the students.