Study On The Textbook Of Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language--Based On The Speech Acts Theory

Textbooks for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL) embody two essential aspects in the field of language teaching: what to teach and how to teach. Therefore, Textbooks have a major impact on the quality of TCFL. How those textbooks regulate the teaching also lies in the way in which the examples are illustrated. Illustrative sentences, as an effective means of teaching, have played an important role in students learning Chinese, who are at various language levels and with different language backgrounds.Many textbooks compiled in China have put too much emphasis on language structure with the focus on grammar characteristic and semantic structure while not enough importance is placed on language function. As a result, in this essay, detailed analysis and research have been done on two representative TCFL textbooks:Modern Chinese and New Practical Chinese Textbook. Classification on "do things with words" examples has been summarized as well as different discourse forms with different language functions and communicative intentions, in the hope of giving some suggestions in textbook-compiling.This essay includes the following parts:1. Give a full introduction to the "speech act theory", serving as a theoretical base for adapting "speech act theory" to analyzing illustrative sentences.2. Prove the importance of studying the textbooks. Analyze, summarize and compile the examples of the two textbooks.3. Make conclusions and give relevant suggestions to textbook-compiling.