A Study Of Speech Acts In The Listening Part Of English Textbooks Go For It!

According to the requirements of The Standards for English Curriculum of the Full-time Compulsory Education(2011)and China’s Standards of English Language Ability(2018),the cultivation of students’ pragmatic competence is one of the main objectives of English teaching.The ability of expressing and understanding of speech acts is an important embodiment of students’ pragmatic competence and the knowledge of speech acts in textbooks is the main resource to cultivate students’ pragmatic competence.Based on the theory of direct speech act and indirect speech act,with reference to the requirements of junior high school students’ pragmatic competence in China’s Standards of English Language Ability(Level 3)and the description of the functions(Level 5)in The Standards for English Curriculum of the Full-time Compulsory Education(2011),this study aims to explore the speech acts knowledge in the listening part of the 5 English textbooks Go for it! to answer the following two research questions:1)What are the distributive characteristics of the speech acts in the listening parts of the English textbooks Go for it!?2)What are the linguistic features of the speech acts in the listening parts of the English textbooks Go for it!?Through the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis of the categories and types of speech acts in the listening parts of the 5 textbooks,the following conclusions are drawn.1)In the listening part of the 5 English textbooks Go for it!,the speech acts occur 2924 times in total.As far as the categories of speech acts are concerned,direct speech acts occur 1950 times,and indirect speech acts occur 974 times,which shows that the proportion of direct speech act is much larger than that of indirect speech act,and the direct speech acts and indirect speech acts are out of balance in distribution.In terms of the types of speech acts,there are mainly 24 types of speech acts appearing in the research materials with no appearance of the speech act of warning.The speech act with the highest frequency is “giving basic information on personal-related topics”,taking up 816 times,and the speech acts with the lowest frequency are “making an appointment” and “persuading”,each occurring twice.From the point of view of the distribution of speech acts in each textbook,the frequency of speech acts increases as the grade goes up,but each type of speech act is unevenly distributed.There are 8kinds of speech acts that only appear in one or two books.2)As far as linguistic features are concerned,each type of speech act has its own relatively fixed lexical features and sentence structure features.Among them,six kinds of direct speech acts adopt the forms of communicative idioms and discourse markers in terms of lexical features.In addition,the same sentence structure can express a variety of speech acts and the same speech act can also be produced by different language forms.Declarative sentences can directly or indirectly express 24 types of speech acts that appear in the textbooks;interrogative sentences can indirectly express three types of speech acts: “requesting”,“suggesting” and“inviting”;imperative sentences can indirectly express “reminding”,“requesting” and“preference”.Conventional indirect speech acts have fixed sentence patterns,while unconventional indirect speech acts involve a variety of sentence patterns,showing strong context-dependence and variability and uncertainty of pragmatic functions.It can be seen that this set of textbooks can basically help students to meet the requirements of China’s Standards of English Language Ability(Level 3)and the functions(Level 5)in The Standards for English Curriculum of the Full-time Compulsory Education(2011).However,there are still some deficiencies and defects in the input of speech act knowledge.