A Study Of The Presentation Of Speech Acts In Two Series Of High School English Textbooks

Influenced by structuralism,English education in China has long focused on the structure of language,instead of its functional use.Besides fluency and accuracy,students need to improve the appropriateness of language.However,in real-life communication,students often encounter pragmatic failure,which leads to communication breakdown.It shows that Chinese students' pragmatic competence is at a low level.Communicative Language Teaching(CLT)and communicative competence has been prescribed in the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2003).Pragmatic competence is one of the components of communicative competence,and therefore,English education should pay more attention to the improvement of students' pragmatic competence,as to improve students' comprehensive language ability.In China,textbooks are the major and perhaps the only source of language input for students.The quality of textbooks affects the quality of language education.Therefore,the evaluation of textbooks is of great practical importance.Speech acts theory holds that people use language to do things,for example,to“apologize”,to “suggest”,to “warn”,to “request” and so on.Based on Searle's theory of classification of speech acts,the study chose two series of high school English textbooks,published by the People's Educational Press(PEP),and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press(FLTRP),to see their differences in the presentation of speech acts.The author firstly collected all the speech acts in the selected textbooks,classified them into different groups based on Searle's classification,and calculated their frequencies.Then the author investigated the distribution features of speech acts.Besides,the speech act of“suggestion” is especially investigated in terms of the realization strategies and modification devices.The results show that in terms of the frequencies and categories of speech acts,PEP textbooks are more comprehensive than FLTRP textbooks.The distribution of speech acts does not show obvious features.As for the realization strategies and modification devices of“suggestion”,PEP textbooks are also better than FLTRP textbooks.The author also makes some suggestions for textbook compilers and language teachers,which may help to improve the quality of textbooks,and the effectiveness of language teaching in classroom.