Junior English Language With The Assessment

Studies have shown that learners'pragmatic competence is of great importance in their communication with the native speakers, the lack of which may cause breakdowns, or pragmatic failures in a face-to-face cross-cultural communication, which may be the reason why the students with excellent grammar knowledge can not communicate effectively. As Thomas (1983) points, in language communication, if the person can not make sentence according to the standard grammar, he will be regarded as speaking poorly, but if he doesn't deal with language according to the pragmatic rules, he will be regarded as"being dishonest or in bad faith". Thus, the knowledge of pragmatics is very important. And is it necessary to teach the knowledge of pragmatics? Studies have shown that in order to avoid pragmatic failure, pragmatic principles as a part of teaching content should be taken into our consideration while teaching English.The subject of the study is the textbook New Standard from foreign language study and teaching press. The study focuses mainly on the distributing of speech acts, namely the amount and the percentage of speech acts and the arrangement of the speech acts in the textbook, and reviews deeply the distributing of request, namely the types of requests and the arrangement of request, one kind of speech acts in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the distribution of speech act items in English textbooks from a pragmatic perspective.Based on related theories, previous studies and with a reference to the speech act table cited by Meng Mei (2006), the paper designs a speech act table. Based on the request tables by Blum-kulka & House and Trosborg, the paper designs a speech act table.The study shows that in the textbooks researched, 17 of 44 speech acts appear, which cover all the five types of Searle's speech acts, and the speech acts appeared are uneven, for example, 10 in book 1 and 8 in book 3. And the distribution of speech acts is uneven too, for example, asking for information is 27.4% and greetings 8.1%. In the textbooks, there are six requests, which cover all the two parts of requests, and the main types of requests are imperative, suggestory formula, permission, ability and obligation statements.The amount of types of the speech acts in the textbook is less than a half, and thus it is better to increase the types of the speech acts and arrange the pragmatic knowledge systematically. Besides, in the textbook, only a certain number of requests appear, and the arrangement is unsystematically. Thus, it is necessary to arrange the requests according to the theory and research results of requests. But as Hu points out, the knowledge of pragmatics is only the base of the pragmatic awareness, which can not ensure the learners to use the language properly. Many scholars hold the argument that the knowledge and the sensitivity of pragmatic principles will promote greatly the development of pragmatic ability of learners. Based on Hu's model of cultivating the pragmatic awareness, we try to select and design some request teaching examples in order to give some inspirations for the teachers and editors and improve the pragmatic awareness of students.