The Pragmatic Evaluation Of The Speech Acts Of Refusal In The Chinese Textbooks For Foreign Learners

Contemporary Chinese textbooks for foreign learners often lack authenticity, which leads to the students’ pragmatic failure. Textbook evaluation helps discover the existing problems, in order to improve the quality of the textbooks. Thus, this thesis examines the speech acts of refusal found in the three textbook series:"Great Wall Chinese:Essentials in Communication","Chinese Listening and Speaking Course" and "New Practical Chinese Reader", then discusses and evaluates their pragmatic authenticity and accuracy.First, basing on the research studies on the Chinese speech acts of refusal, the paper presents typical groups of the refusal strategies used in response to different elicitation sentences, as well as different relationships between the interlocutors. Then, the speech acts of refusal found in the textbook series are analyzed, and the differences between the identified strategies and the typical Chinese refusal strategies are discussed. The thesis also examines all the refusal context settings and expressions, as well as the exercises designed by the textbooks. It is found that although most of the refusals in the textbooks are rather authentic, there are still certain insufficiencies in the field of refusal elucidation and drill. For example, the study reveals the disproportion in the refusals’context settings, scarcity of several crucial refusal strategies, lack of clearly defined context settings, etc. In the last part, basing on all the findings, the paper provides suggestions for the textbooks’ improvement.It is hoped that this study will help the compilers notice the shortcomings of Chinese textbooks for foreign learners, and offer inspiration and guidance for the conversations and exercises’ design.