A Tentative Evaluation Of The Speech Act Of Representatives In Fun With English (2013)

Pragmatic competence, one important factor for effective and successful communication has drawn attention in English learning and teaching. Textbooks, a key component in language learning program, can be considered as the main input resource for the development of pragmatic competence. However, previous studies have paid little attention to China’s English textbooks.Speech act refers to the behavior that people use language for the realization of communicative purpose in the specific context. The basic point of the speech act theory is:the basic unit of human communication should not be the word, sentence, or other form of language, but the behavior which are done by words or sentences. Austin’s speech act theory has certain limitations, and then American philosopher Searle (J.R Searle) inherits and develops the theory of Austin. He divided perlucutionary acts into five categories:representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations, and the three most distinctive factors among all the speech acts are illocutionary point, the direction of fit, and expressed psychological state.Therefore, this study aims to investigate and evaluate a widely used series of English textbooks, Fun with English (2013), intended for secondary school students in Jiangsu province. Specifically, the study, based on Searle’s classification of speech acts theory, examines the presentation of one of his five categories, representatives, as well as teachers’ awareness of speech acts by collecting speech acts of representatives in the textbooks as well as making a survey of teachers’ awareness of speech acts.At first, according to the eight subclasses of representatives (response, statement, description, conclusion, prediction, guess, identification and diagnosis), the author collects all the representatives in the textbooks. Then, the author analyzes the distribution, the modes of its presentation, the obeying of quality maxim of Cooperative Principle, and teachers’ approaches of representatives.Results suggest that:Firstly, although there is more than 1/3 representatives, the distribution of each subclass are unbalanced and the gap between the top and the bottom is 60.81%. Besides, the syntactic patterns are quite single. What’s more, there are only 13 cases violating the maxim of quality, which suggests that most representatives obey the rules. However, this can’t reflect the various language used in our daily life, which shows the textbooks are still full of limitations. In addition, due to the lack of awareness, teachers can’t make full use of the textbooks for the input of pragmatic information. To conclude, the current study brings implications for pragmatic teaching and learning. In order to cultivate students’ pragmatic competence, textbooks should contain more authentic and comprehensive speech acts, as well as sufficient explicit explanations. Teachers need to supplement necessary pragmatic information and design certain activities to raise students’ pragmatic awareness.