A Research Of Speech Acts In EFL Textbooks From A Pragmatic Perspective

Pragmatic competence is often neglected in favor of other linguistic skills,be it grammatical or phonological abilities,in the field of teaching English as a foreign language.It is not uncommon that a university graduate,after studying English as a school subject for more than 10 years,still finds it hard to communicate in English in a natural way.In fact,the majority of English learners struggle when speaking with native speakers in common daily encounters.One of the problems lies in the quality of textbooks in terms of its pragmatic contents.Speech acts,being one of the most researched areas in pragmatics and also the most relevant to the appropriateness of everyday language use,play a crucial role in developing students' pragmatic competence.The design and presentation of speech acts in the textbooks are therefore of significant importance.This study aims to research and examine the quantity and quality of speech acts in one of the most widely used textbooks for junior middle schools in Shanghai,Oxford English(Shanghai edition).The author seeks to answer several key questions as follows: 1)How many types of speech acts are presented in Oxford English;2)How well these contents are designed and presented;3)What are users'(teachers as well as students)view on Oxford English in terms of the efficiency of learning speech acts and developing pragmatic competence.Also,how teachers see and value the importance of pragmatic and communicative competence is one of the questions to be answered in the study.The findings suggest the number of the types of speech acts included in Oxford English is satisfactory compared with the results of other relevant studies.However,the distribution of each type of the speech acts are not well-balanced.The textbooks also show a lack of meta-pragmatic information and this might lead to the ineffectiveness of teaching pragmatic contents of the textbook as well as developing students' pragmatic competence.The questionnaires done by teachers as well as students show that both sides are well aware of the importance of being pragmatic competent.Although the textbook users are quite content with the range and the number of speech acts presented,they are,however,less satisfied with the way these speech acts are presented.Based on these findings,the study offers several constructive suggestions on the design of speech acts of future textbooks as well as the approach of teaching pragmatics in class.