The Presentation Of Speech Acts In Oral English Books

A large number of previous studies have shown that the so-called mute and dumb English prevails among Chinese students,especially among students studying in rural areas and so-called second-tier and third-tier cities.With the development of globalization and the change of national conditions that China is embracing the world more than ever,it is more than ever urgent for Chinese students to acquire the ability to communicate with English native speakers appropriately and successfully.Although a great many studies on English pragmatic competence have been conducted,a majority of them were made to evaluate Chinese students' English pragmatic competence and a few were conducted to make an evaluation of English textbooks for middle school,high school or college students.This thesis is a trying to make an evaluation of oral English books which are compiled to facilitate the development of pragmatic competence to see whether oral English books present rich and explicit pragmatic knowledge.Since most college students,especially those who don't major in English,choose to turn to oral English books to improve their pragmatic competence and they prefer to borrow books from university library than buy books,this thesis will try to conduct a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of six oral English books from Shanghai International Studies University Library.This study attempts to make an evaluation of the presentation of speech acts in six oral English books selected from Shanghai International Studies University Library from the perspective of quantity and quality to see whether enough and various speech acts are presented in these selected books and whether enough and explicit meta-pragmatic and contextual information is provided.For the qualitative evaluation,an evaluation of the speech act of apology is conducted.Results show that1)there is a paucity of speech acts and the average percentage of six books including speech acts is only 28.3%.And some kinds of speech acts like “threatening”,“warning”,“declaring”,“welcoming” and so on are not presented in the six oral English books.2)Meta-pragmatic and contextual information is far from enough and too general.Among all the six books,from book 1 to book 5,contextual informationis deduced by learners through reading dialogues presented in books.Only in book 6,a contextual description is provided before the dialogue begins.Contextual information such as the age,gender and social status of Speaker and Hearer is never presented.Contextual information like the relationship between Speaker and Hearer and the place where the conversation happens is gotten through reading dialogues.Meta-pragmatic information like the degree of formality,politeness strategy,indirect speech act strategy,social norms and so on are not at all involved.And only in book 1,a cultural tip is provided.More various speech acts as well as richer and more explicit meta-pragmatic and contextual information are expected to be presented in oral English books so as to facilitate the development of learners' pragmatic competence.