Textbook Evaluation From A Pragmatic Perspective: A Case Study

In the early 1990s, due to the fact that Chinese people are getting more involved in international communities, the attention of English educators was drawn to the development of English learners' communicative competence which has long been ignored in the past. The most booming international exchanges ever require that Chinese English learners master real-life English to communicate with native speakers fluently rather than just learn the grammatical rules from books by rote. However, the lack of knowledge of customs or conventions of other cultures and the impossible avoidance of negative pragmatic transfer of mother language make pragmatic failure highly possible to break down cross-cultural communications. Consequently, how to develop pragmatic competence in English, which is the ability to use appropriate language in different contexts, turns out to be one of the priorities of English teachers and researchers here in China. This study of textbook evaluation aims to find out the weight of pragmatic info mation presented in current EFL textbooks, and whether learners may obtain pragmatic information from textbooks, which are considered center of curriculum and syllabus in most classrooms. In the study, pragmatic features, such as speech act, formality/register, politeness, cultural elements, discourse features, are investigated in the selected five-book series, Interactions Mosaic Series: Listening/Speaking Strand. Metapragmatic discussions about each pragmatic feature are traced as effective pragmatic information accessible to textbook users. The findings show that each book of the Series contains certain pages on which pragmatic features are presented. Among all the pragmatic features, speech act takes the most significant place. The majority of metapragmatic discussions are dedicated to the explanation of speech acts with face threatening nature. Although it is not unlikely that learners may acquire pragmatic knowledge by using this series of textbooks, the effectiveness of the textbooks in learners' pragmatic competence development needs to be further studied.