A Preliminary Exploration Into Searle's Indirect Speech Act Theory And Its Implications For Communicative Language Teaching Method

The speech act theory which was proposed by Austin, aiming at exploring meanings from a pragmatic perspective and in a dynamic way, deserves our attention. Based on Austin's theory, Searle has developed it into a more perfect one, from which the indirect speech act theory is of our concern in this thesis just because this theory is a one that advocates realizing one primary speech act through the utterance of a secondary speech act. Furthermore, it has inherited one of the essences from Austin's theory, say, and the exploration of illocutionary force, which not only probes into the literal meaning but also the implication of an utterance. This has changed our concentration on grammatical structures or formation of words in our past research completely. Also the speech act, especially for the primary speech act, could be realized under the stipulation of one's intentionality. This intentionality is quite subjective and could only work when the speaker is uttering something with a certain intention or to realize an intentional purpose, therefore it is essential to implicate one's intentionality if you want to know the primary meaning of his utterance. Thus the discussions on Searle's theory of intentionality is worthy of being done. The related theories proposed by Grice and Leech have also contributed to the development of Searle's speech act theory. By analyzing the indirect speech act theory whose philosophical basis is theory of intentionality, it is helpful for us to realize how illocutionary force was made in daily communication. As is estimated that there're numerous defects in our traditional English teaching, thus in recent years the implementation and the development of Communicative Language Teaching have got its prosperity. The advantages of CLT over the traditional teaching methods have been discussed and proved repeatedly by other experts, therefore my purpose in this thesis is to make some complementation for my ancestors in this area, under the guidance of Searle's indirect speech act theory, just in order to implicate the English teachers, who ensure the application of CLT as the premise in their teaching, and then to consider or analyze the illocutionary force of the content they taught, which will eventually enhance the comprehension competence of the students in their daily communication.