An Evaluation Of Speech Acts In NSEFC From Pragmatic Perspective

In China, influenced by examination system, English language teaching focuses on students'linguistic competence development rather than pragmatic competence cultivation. It turns out that most students fail to make appropriate utterances in real communication though they have a good command of grammar and vocabulary. In recent years, more and more English educators have realized the significance of developing and cultivating pragmatic competence as China becomes increasingly closer with the international communities.Speech act, as interlanguage pragmatics in its narrow sense, is of typical significance in studying cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics (Huang Jie, 2009: 68). English textbooks, as an important component in the English curriculum implementation, are treated as the main basis for teachers to organize teaching activities and the major resource for students to acquire language knowledge, skills and learning strategies. In view of this, this paper attempts to analyze the presentation of speech acts in NSEFC based on previous researches and related linguistic theories at home and abroad. The textbook analysis and investigation methods are employed by this study. The purpose of textbook analysis is to answer the following questions: what speech acts are presented? Do they meet students' communicative needs? Do the textbooks include the metapragmatic knowledge of speech acts? If so, what about the quality? Does the presentation of speech acts accord with communicative requirements and cognitive laws of learners? What kinds of tasks are designed in the selected textbooks for speech acts enhancement? The investigation mainly consists of questionnaire and interview. The questionnaire is applied to understand the learners'expectation and appraisal on the textbooks,and the interview is conducted to explore what teachers have done to compensate the demerits included in the selected textbooks. The final results indicate that the distribution of speech acts has both merits and demerits in NSEFC. The merits lie in: students are satisfied with the difficulty and topics of speech acts; the tasks designed for speech act acquisition reflect the idea of cooperative learning and student-centered; and the presentation of some speech acts shows difficulty increases and content extends with each repetition. The demerits are chiefly manifested in lacking often-used speech acts and metapragmatic information in NSEFC which may block students'pragmatic awareness improvement. And the interview findings reveal that most English teachers have realized that the insufficient metapragmatic information in NSEFC may hinder pragmatic competence improvement, and supplementary information of speech acts is also provided to students by some teachers, but that is limited in terms of specific and comprehensive.In the concluding part of this paper, concrete suggestions for teachers and textbook compilers are proposed in accordance with the distributed characteristics of speech acts in the selected textbooks, aiming at providing references for teachers in speech act teaching and textbook compilers for further adjusting and improving the presentation of speech acts in textbooks. Moreover, specific teaching methods for cultivating students'pragmatic consciousness are proposed by the author.