A Pragmatic Evaluation Of Oxford English Textbook For Junior High Schools

As an essential part of communicative competence,pragmatic competence is necessary for successful communication,which is being given more and more emphases in English instruction.Meanwhile,the English Curriculum Standards(2011)emphasizes the significance of cultivating learners' English pragmatic competence.In the EFL setting in China,textbooks serve as the primary source of language input and play a crucial role in pragmatic instruction.As a result,whether textbooks present adequate and well-designed pragmatic knowledge,and whether they are optimized by teachers in pragmatic instruction will have a great impact on learners' pragmatic competence cultivation.However,previous studies paid little attention to pragmatic evaluation on domestic EFL textbooks for junior high school learners.Based on the related theories of textbooks evaluation and pragmatics,this study constructs a textbooks evaluation framework to evaluate a set of textbooks(Oxford English Textbook for Junior High Schools)widely used in Guangdong Province from a pragmatic view.The research questions are as follow: 1.What types of speech acts are presented in Oxford English Textbook for Junior High Schools? What is the weight of these speech acts? 2.What are the distribution,contextual description and metapragmatic information of speech acts in Oxford English Textbook for Junior High Schools? 3.What are teachers' opinions on speech acts instruction through Oxford English Textbook for Junior High Schools? This study is a combination of quantitative and qualitative research.A page-by-page textbook analysis and an investigation on 38 teachers via questionnaires are conducted to evaluate the textbook from a pragmatic view.Results show that: 1.The quantity of speech acts is inadequate.There are 47 types of speech acts presented in only 45.6% pages of the textbook.2.The distribution of the weight and difficulty of speech act contents roughly follows a developing trend with the developing levels of the textbook.The presentation of contextual description and metapragmatic information is unsatisfactory in terms of quantity and quality.3.Because of teachers' limited pragmatic cognition and theinadequacy of pragmatic input in the textbook,the textbook is not optimized in the aspect of pragmatic instruction.Based on the findings of this study,some implications are provided for textbook compilers and teachers to improve textbook compilation and pragmatic instruction.