A Global Analysis Of Speech Acts Treatment In Fun With English

As one of an essential part of communicative competence and one of the important features for effective and successful communication, pragmatic competence has been drawn more and more attention in English learning and teaching. Meanwhile, English Curriculum Standards (2011) clearly demonstrates the important role that pragmatic competence plays in China’s English learning environment. Textbooks, a key component in language teaching and learning, can be considered as the main teaching material for pragmatic instruction. Consequently, whether pragmatic information is well presented in English textbooks and whether textbooks are fully used by English instructors as for pragmatic instruction will directly influence students’pragmatic competence development. However, previous studies have criticized the poor input of pragmatic information in various textbooks for students of different levels in other countries, with little attention to speech acts treatment in China’s English textbooks for junior high students.This study, based on pragmatic theories, investigates and evaluates a widely used set of English textbooks(Fun with English) intended for junior high school students in Jiangsu Province from speech acts perspective, aiming to examine what and how speech acts are presented in the textbooks, whether there are enough and explicit contextual discussion, meta-pragmatic information and authentic linguistic expressions provided. And this study also investigates74teachers’ understanding on and using conditions of textbooks who represent different schools in Jiangsu. Findings indicate that1) although textbook writers have pragmatic awareness, there is not enough and rich presentation of speech acts, with only36.5%pages on the average and merely36types of speech acts involved (totally45), and the presentation is neither well-patterned nor in all-level developing process.2) The quality of speech acts presented is unsatisfying:contextual description is too general, pragmatic information contains only1.02%pages, and linguistic forms are neither rich enough nor authentic.3) Textbooks are not fully used in classroom as for speech acts learning due to the lack of pragmatic input and teachers’understanding and awareness. In addition, this study also draws implications about textbook writing and teachers’ instruction for developing pragmatic competence.