| As a significant part of linguistic competence,pragmatic competence plays an extremely important role in social communication.Those effects are not only reflected in the use of native language,they are even more obvious in the learning and use of a foreign or second language.Due to the differences of living environment,social environment and cultural knowledge,a vast majority of Chinese students have pragmatic mistakes in using a foreign or second language to communicate in real life situations.The ultimate goal of learning English is to use English to communicate effectively.But for Chinese students,pragmatic mistakes seem to be an obstacle that cannot be overcome.One of the factors causing this problem is that teachers do not have enough foreign language pragmatic competence,which makes them unsuccessful in teaching students relevant pragmatic knowledge.Besides,in the context of examination-oriented education,Chinese teachers do not realize the importance of pragmatic competence.Their teaching process is scripted,and the content and methods of teaching are mainly set according to the curriculum and textbooks.The third factor is the relative lack of real life contexts and pragmatic phenomena presented in the textbooks.In this study,the author analyzed the proportion of the speech acts in the textbooks of “English”(Go for it)published by People's Education Press based on Austin and Searle's speech act theory so as to find out whether the students can acquire relevant pragmatic knowledge through their learning of the textbooks and then master the pragmatic knowledge in dialogues.The results of the study show that the textbooks investigated contain 15 kinds of directive speech acts(in total 28 kinds examined).The proportion of it is 53.5%.The results indicate that the proportion and the number of all kinds of directive speech acts are unbalanced in the textbooks.The types of the directive speech acts covered in the five textbooks are also different. |
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