A Study Of Speech Acts Included In Fltrp High School English Textbooks

Pragmatic competence refers to the ability to accurately understand others and appropriately express oneself in a specific context,which is an essential part of communicative competence.Traditional English teaching pays more attention to grammar and vocabulary teaching,and emphasizes students’ reading ability,but neglects the cultivation of learners’ pragmatic ability.As a result,even if many learners can speak grammatical sentences,they cannot achieve the expected communicative purpose.The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017 Edition)emphasizes that cultivating students’ pragmatic competence is the focus of English teaching.In the environment of foreign language teaching in China,textbooks are important language input media and play an important role in teaching.As the core of pragmatic knowledge,the presentation of speech acts in textbooks plays a crucial role in the cultivation of students’ pragmatic competence.In view of this,based on textbook evaluation and pragmatics theory,this study analyzes the quantity and quality of speech acts in the 7 English textbooks of FLTRP for high school by using the Speech Acts Scale and teachers’ questionnaires.Meanwhile,this study also explores the status quo of the classroom teaching of the speech acts included in the concerned textbooks.This study tries to answer the following research questions:1)What are the types and frequency of speech acts in the 7 English textbooks of FLTRP for high school?2)How are these speech acts designed and presented?3)What is the status quo of the classroom teaching of speech acts in the textbook?The results of this study are as follows: 1)The types of speech acts are rich.However,the high-frequency speech acts and low-frequency speech acts are not balanced in appearance,and some daily speech acts are not.2)There is a certain regularity in the repetition of speech acts in textbooks;The speech act activity design embodies the student-centered principle and the concept of cooperative learning.But the meta-pragmatic information of speech act is unsatisfactory in quantity and quality.3)Due to the pressure of college entrance examination teaching and the lack of pragmatic ability of teachers,the classroom teaching of speech acts in textbooks is not good and has not received appropriate attention.Based on the above research results,this paper puts forward some suggestions for textbook editors and teachers to improve the quality of the textbooks and pragmatic teaching.