An Investigation Into The Realization Of Pragmatic Competence Development In Go For It!

Pragmatic competence is essential to cross-cultural communication and has attracted more and more attention in English learning and teaching nowadays. English Curriculum Standards (2011) emphasizes the importance of pragmatic competence development.Since textbook is the visible heart of any ELT program and may be the only language input for students in some under-developed areas in China, whether pragmatic knowledge is well presented in English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks will directly have an influence on students' pragmatic competence development. Although previous research shows that ELT textbooks in some foreign countries have been criticized for not offering classroom learners adequate opportunity for learning authentic language, little research attention was paid to ELT textbooks at home, especially textbooks used by low proficiency learners.Based on speech act theory and noticing hypothesis, this research aims to analyze and evaluate a widely used set of ELT textbooks (Go for it!) designed for junior middle schools in Hubei from the perspective of speech acts. To be specific, this study tries to explore the frequency and distribution of speech acts and contextual clues,meta-pragmatic information and linguistic forms in the selected textbooks. Moreover,this research carries out a survey on students' pragmatic competence after learning the whole set of Go for it in three classes of a senior high school in Wuhan. Three research questions were raised and answered in this study:(1) What are the distribution and frequency of 27 speech acts in Go for it?(2) Are there adequate, appropriate and explicit contextual description,meta-pragmatic information and linguistic forms of speech acts in Go for it?(3) To what extent does Go for it facilitate the development of students' pragmatic competence?Major findings related to the three research questions include: 1) the frequency and distribution of speech acts presented in the selected ELT textbooks is neither even nor systematic; 2) contextual description is too general and does not pay enough attention to the contextual factors like age, gender, social power and cultural factors. Moreover,meta-pragmatic information is rarely mentioned in quantity. Among 410 pages of all the textbooks, only 7 pages involve meta-pragmatic information. Besides, in terms of the authenticity of linguistic forms of speech acts, not all of these forms seem to match what previous research has found about speech act use in both naturalistic and clinically elicited discourse and the variety of linguistic forms is quite limited; 3) through the questionnaire, it can be seen that the average pragmatic competence of Senior One students after learning the whole set of Go for it is at intermediate level. And students could not satisfactorily master those speech acts occurring with low frequencies or not being recycled and did worse in the multiple choices requiring more than one answer.To sum up, the findings of this study highlight the uneven distribution of speech acts,inadequate contextual clues and meta-pragmatic information and limited number of linguistic expressions for speech acts in the selected ELT textbooks, which bear some implications for ELT textbook developers and language instructors.