The Representation Of Speech Acts In English Textbooks For Chinese English-Major Students

With the development of EFL teaching and learning,EFL learners’ pragmatic development has also attracted much attention.It is observed that EFL learners often fail to communicate freely with native speakers due to a lack of pragmatic knowledge.Therefore,instruction on pragmatics in EFL contexts is essential and necessary.As the main source of EFL learners’ pragmatic input,EFL textbooks play an exceedingly essential role in learners’ pragmatic development.The question as to whether EFL textbooks offer learners adequate and appropriate representation of pragmatic knowledge is therefore extremely significant to address.Speech acts,as an essential aspect of pragmatic knowledge,are also closely related to appropriate language use in different communicative contexts.Therefore,the representation of speech acts in EFL textbooks is of vital importance for developing and promoting learners’ pragmatic competence.Despite the fact that multiple studies have explored L2 pragmatic competence,few studies have investigated the representation of speech acts and the associated realizations in the Chinese EFL contexts.This points to the need to investigate the representation of speech acts in EFL textbooks used in Chinese universities.Therefore,based on speech act theory,the present study presents a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the representation of speech acts in textbooks for English-major students in China.Specifically,this study,adopting the taxonomy of speech acts provided in Weisser(2018),investigates the representation of speech acts in four essential textbooks used by Chinese English-major undergraduate students,aiming to offer some implications for EFL textbook design,compilation,and/or adaptation.This research firstly explored what speech acts are included in these selected EFL textbooks,focusing on the amount and types of speech acts.Then the realizations of each type of speech acts included in selected textbooks were examined in detail.Bearing these in mind,the present study addresses the following research questions:(1)What speech acts are represented in recent EFL textbooks used by Chinese English-major undergraduate students?(2)In what manner are speech acts represented in recent EFL textbooks used by Chinese English-major undergraduate students?(3)What are the existing problems concerning the representation of speech acts in EFL textbooks used by Chinese English-major undergraduate students?(4)What are the solutions to the problems found in selected textbooks under investigation?Through systematic analyses and discussion,the results show that the EFL textbooks under analysis do contain contents related to speech acts,in that there are at least one third of contents concerning speech acts.Apart from this,limitations are also noted through analyzing the data.Firstly,textbooks researched in the present study do not cover a wide range of speech acts for the reason that among the 132 subtypes of speech acts defined in DART speech-act taxonomy,only 46 subtypes are mentioned in textbooks on average.Some frequently used speech acts,such as admit,or complaint were rarely found in these selected textbooks.The second limitation lies in the uneven distributional characteristics of the types of speech acts occurring in textbooks under investigation.Looking back at the Table 4.5,among these occurring speech acts,apart from the three most frequent speech acts direct,suggest,and req Info,41 subtypes of speech acts occur with a definitely low frequency accounting for less than 1%.Thirdly,examination of the realizations of varieties of speech acts included in selected textbooks,shows that the researched textbooks lack variations for expressing each type of speech acts.The study has important pedagogical implications,especially for the design and compilation of EFL textbooks for English-major students.Textbook compilers are supposed to offer well-designed textbooks of higher quality that include abundant pragmatic sources for teaching.Firstly,the present study suggests that textbook writers enrich the varieties of speech acts in textbooks.The second suggestion is that textbook writers should balance the frequency of the different types of speech acts contained in textbooks.The third suggestion for textbook compilation is that textbook writers should broaden the realizations of each type of speech acts.With regard to the weakness of textbooks under investigation,English teachers also need to find out some effective methods to compensate for the limitations of textbooks for the cultivation of learners’ pragmatic competence.One method suggested here is adopting authentic materials from a corpus as complements for the pragmatic teaching materials.It is hoped that more efforts could be made to thoroughly investigate the representation of speech acts in EFL textbooks in the Chinese context,so as to offer more comprehensive suggestions for the design and compilation of textbooks that could be useful for the teaching of L2 pragmatics.