Toward An Illocutionary Forces Survey In English Learners

Illocutionary forces are very important in the speech act theory and there have been a lot of researches on it ever since Austin wrote his book, How to Do Things with Words. Searle revised the classification of speech acts by Austin and made the theory develop systematically.According to Austin, there are four conditions for an illocutionary act to be felicitous and he named them Felicity Conditions. Searle further developed his Felicity Conditions and put forward the so-called Illocutionary Forces Indicating Devices (IFIDs). There are some factors that will affect people's identification of illocutionary forces, they are indirect speech acts and conversational implicature.I did a survey to see how well English learners identify illocutionary forces and how this influences their communication with others in English. I interviewed some English learners and teachers as well as native speakers of English. From the survey I learnt that listening and speaking are vital for an English learner's identification of illocutionary forces, and people have difficulty in identifying the illocutionary forces in indirect speech acts and conversational implicature. Some English teachers propose some ideas to reform English teaching in order to improve the students' communicative competence, and I also try to throw some light on English teaching.