Realization Of Pragmatic Competence Cultivation In New Senior English For China(Student's Book)

Pragmatic competence is the interlocutors' ability to comprehend and use a language appropriately in a given context.Nowadays,how to cultivate students' pragmatic competence has attracted increasing attention from the English teaching researchers and practitioners.In an EFL learning environment in China,textbooks are crucial backbones of English input for Chinese English learners,especially for those in underdeveloped areas.Therefore,whether the English textbooks have presented effectively rich and authentic pragmatic content will exert a direct impact on the development of Chinese English learners' pragmatic competence.The foreign research on ELT textbook evaluation has revealed that pragmatic content is missing to varying degrees in English textbooks for all stages.And only few domestic studies have evaluated ELT textbooks from the pragmatic perspective,of which fewer have assessed senior English textbooks.Besides,a review on the domestic research of English textbooks evaluation has indicated that there is a necessity to appraise whether the current widely-used senior English textbooks have covered sufficient pragmatic information from the perspective of speech acts.More specifically,it is urgently desired to evaluate whether speech acts have been presented sufficiently in senior English textbooks,how they are presented and whether specific treatments have been given to the strategies for those speech acts which are easily performed inappropriately by Chinese English learners.Based on the previous research,the present study is intended to evaluate the realization of pragmatic competence cultivation in New Senior English for China(Student's Book)from the perspective of speech acts,on the strength of theoretical foundations of pragmatic competence,speech act theories,the noticing hypothesis,explicit instruction and the cognitive theory of language learning.The following three questions are raised to study:(1)How many types of speech acts are presented in New Senior English for China(Student's Book)? And what are characteristics of their distribution?(2)What are the most frequently presented speech acts in New Senior English for China(Student's Book)? And how are they presented in New Senior English for China(Student's Book)?(3)What strategies for the apology speech act are presented in New Senior English for China(Student's Book)?New Senior English for China(Student's Book)is composed of textbooks and workbooks and only the first five volumes pertain to compulsory course.Therefore,the first five textbooks and workbooks were chosen as the research objects.Corpora,such as dialogues between characters,direct speeches in narrative texts,speech bubbles in picture stories,and the language boxes with expressions for speech acts,were collected by searching page by page.Then,codification and categorization of utterances into speech acts were conducted.The results were illustrated as follows:(1)The series of New Senior English for China(Student's Book)have presented 54 types of speech acts in total.Besides,five speech-act categories,i.e.assertives,directives,expressives,commissives and declarations,are all presented,with the directives the most frequently-presented and declarations the least frequently-framed.More specifically,such speech-act types as suggestion,request,agreement,complaint,compliment are presented in a high frequency while the speech acts of thank,invitation,greeting and farewell,etc,in a low frequency.Analyses of the presented speech-act types in five student's books have also discovered that the speech act of apology,which has been found to be easily performed inappropriately by Chinese English learners in the literature,is rarely presented in the five volumes under evaluation.(2)Further analyses of the speech-act distribution in New Senior English for China(Student's Book)have unveiled that there is a significant difference among five volumes in the speech-act coverage,with the third one covering the most speech acts.Besides,speech acts are presented intensively in the module of Using language among six modules of the textbooks and the module of Using structures among nine modules of the workbooks respectively.The corresponding workbooks remain fairly consistent with the textbooks in the speech-act types and fluctuation trends.(3)The most frequently-presented speech act in New Senior English for China(Student's Book)is “making suggestions” and its presentation characteristics have been further analyzed in terms of explicit/implicit instruction,semantic formulas and social contextual and meta-pragmatic information.Suggestions are found to be mainly instructed in an implicit way;modals/semi-modals among the semantic formulas are most frequently presented for making suggestions,which are yet not the most authentic formulas for suggesting preferred by English native speakers;and social contextual and meta-pragmatic information about giving advice is insufficient or even missing in many cases.(4)The speech act of apology is frequently performed in daily communication but unexpectedly difficult for Chinese English learners to conduct felicitously.Therefore,its presentation in New Senior English for China(Student's Book)was investigated.Results have displayed that there are only nine cases of apologizing collected from these student's books under inquiry.The scarcity of apology cases in turn gives rise to a very limited presentation of strategies for apologizing.Besides,intensifiers and interjections,which can deepen regrets and enhance sincerity so as to maintain interpersonal relationships to a certain degree,have been found disappointingly to be seldom introduced except “very”,“so” and “oh” in New Senior English for China(Student's Book).In light of these findings,some implications have been drawn on how to cultivate learners' pragmatic competence via textbooks.Firstly,textbook compilers should take full advantage of the fruitful accomplishments of studies on pragmatics,pragmatic failures and the development of pragmatic competence to make the pragmatic content presentation in ELT textbooks more scientific and the cultivation of pragmatic competence via textbooks morefeasible and effective.They are suggested to incorporate into the English textbooks these speech acts in which pragmatic failures are often made by Chinese English learners and to arrange them regularly into various modules or volumes of the textbooks based on the noticing hypothesis and the cognitive theory of language learning.Moreover,textbook compilers could provide plentiful socio-contextual and meta-pragmatic information and authentic expressions in a more explicit way.Meanwhile,they ought to frame various strategies for performing speech acts.Secondly,English instructors should make full use of various teaching resources and integrate them with the textbooks to make up for the shortage of contextual and meta-pragmatic information on speech acts and to cultivate students' pragmatic competence.Besides,corpora from real communication are also advised to be applied by teachers to assist the specific treatments to various strategies and felicitous expressions for speech acts which students fail to master.Lastly,learners are expected to use ELT textbooks properly to improve their pragmatic competence.When using textbooks,they are suggested to pay special attention to the hidden contextual and meta-pragmatic information in contexts and the proper use of ready-made semantic formulas in the textbooks.Furthermore,they are strongly recommended to master various strategies for speech acts which are greatly different from Chinese ones and easily to be performed inappropriately by them.At the same time,they are expected to acquire speech-act knowledge by performing speech acts in real communication so that they are able to avoid making pragmatic failures as much as possible and deal with complex cross-cultural communication with ease.