A Pragmatic Evaluation Of The English Textbooks Go For It! In Junior Middle School

Since pragmatic competence plays a very important role in the communication, the cultivation ofcommunicative competence will be in vain without the cultivation of pragmatic competence. Students areequipped with linguistic knowledge cannot reach an ideal communicative effect is the manifestation oflacking of pragmatic competence. Just as Thomas (1983) refers to that if the person can not make sentenceaccording to the standard grammar, in language communication, he will be regarded as speaking poorly, butif he doesn’t deal with language according to the pragmatic rules, he will be regarded as “being dishonestor in bad faith”. Thus, the knowledge of pragmatics is very important. Studies have shown that thedevelopment of linguistic competence can not assure the development of pragmatic competence; andpragmatic competence can be acquired in the English teaching. Consequently, how to develop pragmaticcompetence in English, which is the ability to sue appropriate language in different contexts, turns out to beone of the priorities of English teachers and researchers here in China. Meanwhile, the English curriculumhas already made a clear requirement for the cultivation of students.Textbooks usually are considered to be the key of curriculum and syllabus in the Chinese Englishclassrooms. Therefore, the subjects of this research are English textbooks Go for it!(published by People’sEducation Press) and162students. The study mainly analyzes the proportions of five pragmatic features,speech act, register/formality, politeness, cultural elements, and discourse feature contained in the targetEnglish textbooks Go for it!(published by People’s Education Press). The pragmatic discussions about eachpragmatic feature are traced as effective pragmatic information accessible to textbooks users. The researchpays more attention to the discussion of the distribution of speech act, deeply analyzes the proportion of theapology speech act in the textbooks and finally combines with the results of students in a DCT in order tohave a comprehensive understanding of the distribution of pragmatic information in English textbooks froma pragmatic perspective.The study firstly figures out all pages of five pragmatic features contained in the textbooks bycounting their pages and then makes a specific classification of speech act and apology speech actaccording to a speech act scale and apology strategies scale of CCSARP respectively. The author takes aDCT to test140(valid numbers) junior three school students about their abilities to know about apologyspeech act strategies and finally combines with the proportion and repetition rate of apology speech act inthe textbooks to make an analysis and discussion for evaluating the English textbooks completely from thepragmatic perspective. The results reveal that all five series textbooks conclude five main pragmatic features, among them;the proportion of speech act is the most and reaches16%, and the proportion of register/formality is theleast and reaches only5.1%. There are16of36speech acts appear in the whole series textbooks, whichcover all the five types of Searle’s speech acts, and the speech acts appeared are uneven, for example,10inthe first volume for grade7and7in the textbook for grade9. The distribution proportion of speech actsdoesn’t increase with the growth of difficulty level of the textbook series. And the distribution of speechacts is uneven too, for example, asking for information is31.1%and extending gratitude is only1.7%. Asto detailed apology, there are20apologies in the textbooks and covers most apology strategies, but thetextbooks don’t cover all the subcategories. Therefore the apologies are not reflected completely andsystematically in the textbooks. Combined with the results of students in the DCT, students have in firmcommand of those apology strategies appearing with low frequencies and nor being emphasized, and havedone worse about those which don’t appear in the textbooks at all.On this account, the author suggests the composition of textbooks should be carried out from theperspective of pragmatics: at first, the proportion and repetition frequency of pragmatic knowledge shouldbe increased in English textbooks for junior school students. Second, enhance the training part of pragmaticcompetence in English textbooks. Lastly, improve the pragmatic awareness of both the textbooks compilerand English teachers.