A Study Of Dialogues In Junior English Coursebook

As the most important source of language input, English coursebook plays a crucial role in English teaching and learning. It is significant to choose the appropriate and desirable coursebook for students and teachers. This paper takes the dialogues in junior English coursebook Go for it published by People's Education Publication as the discourse to analyze from the perspective of interpersonal meaning, aiming at exploring how interpersonal meaning is realized and offering guidelines on the teaching of dialogues in Go for it.According to the Systemic-Functional approach, language has three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunction. Interpersonal meaning means that the speaker uses the language to express himself, influencing other people's attitudes or behaviors. It serves to establish social relation between the speaker and the listener. Within various devices for the realization of interpersonal meaning, Mood system, Modality system and Person System have been chosen as the analytical unit. In terms of Mood system, the interpersonal meaning of declaratives, interrogatives and imperatives are studied; with regard to Modality, four kinds of Modality expression are discussed, including the modal operators, Mood Adjuncts, expansion of the Predicator, combination of both modal operator and Mood Adjunct; and as for the Person System, the interpersonal meaning of the three person pronouns are analyzed.It is found that different choices in Mood, Modality and Person System realize different interpersonal meaning. Within the Mood system, the declaratives are applied the most frequently, indicating that people involved in the dialogues exchange certain information with each other, establishing an equal social relation. Most of the dialogues in Go for it follows the pattern of interrogatives alternating with declaratives, which greatly promotes the interaction between the speaker and listener. Different choices in Modality expression reflect the speaker's attitudes or viewpoints and the relationship between the speaker and listener. Within the Person System, large application of the first person pronoun and the second person pronoun indicates that the dialogues in Go for it are quite interactive and suitable for junior students to use as the learning and teaching material.The analysis indicates that the dialogues in Go for it employ flexible language forms, emphasizing on the interpersonal meaning of language. What's more, the given contexts of the dialogues are typical and diverse. Therefore, being a natural and lifelike teaching material, the dialogues in Go for it is a desirable resource which can improve students' communicative competence effectively. The communicative approach is suggested to be applied to the teaching of this part, making the students know exactly what kind of expressions should be used to express themselves appropriately in particular context. The teaching objective of this part is to develop the students' communicative competence.