A Study On The Speech Act Of “Suggestion” In The PEP High School English Textbooks

For a long time,some English teachers have been paying attention to the structure of language rather than its functional use.However,in addition to fluency and accuracy,pragmatic competence,as one of the learners' language abilities,has to be improved.Some studies have shown that in the real life,Chinese students often encounter pragmatic failures,which end up with an unsuccessful communication.This shows that the pragmatic competence of Chinese students is at a low level.In order to improve this situation,the National Language Working Committee of the Ministry of Education of the People' s Republic of China has published the Chinese English Proficiency Assessment Scale,officially incorporating pragmatic competence into the foreign language ability assessment system.And it has a clear definition and description about pragmatic competence and pragmatic knowledge,among which the knowledge and competence of speech act is an indispensable part.It is known to us all that textbooks are the main source of language input for students in most parts of China,and even the only source.The pragmatic knowledge presented in textbooks will affect the development of students' pragmatic competence to a certain extent.Therefore,this study,taking PEP high school English compulsory textbooks as the main research object,attempts to analyze the speech act knowledge,and the following two research questions are specifically to be discussed.1)What is the occurrence frequency of the speech act of “suggestion” in the textbooks?2)What are the linguistic characteristics of the speech act of “suggestion” in the textbooks?Through the careful identification and classification of the speech act of“suggestion” appearing in the five copies of the high school English compulsory textbooks and the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the collected data,the results are as follows.1)In these five high school English compulsory textbooks,the speech acts of“suggestion” occur 228 times.Book 5 presents the highest frequency,followed by Book 3.Among the selected textbooks,Book 1 presents the lowest frequency.The reason for this phenomenon may be related to the difficulty of language knowledge and the English level of students as well as their capacity for pragmatic knowledge.2)Of 228 speech acts of “suggestion”,222 are indirect speech act,and only 6belong to direct speech act.In terms of the language characteristics by which the speech act of “suggestion” is realized,the linguistic formulae of “direct suggestion”are comparatively simple,which are only involved in two categories: “performative verb of suggestion” and “nouns of suggestion”,however,the linguistic expressions performing “indirect suggestion” are more diversified and complicated.In the analyzed data from the textbooks,there are roughly nine kinds of language structures that can realize the indirect speech act of suggestion: “modals and semi-modals with you as the agent”,“imperatives”,“negative imperatives”,“wh-questions”,“yes-no questions”,“conditionals”,“inclusive-we”,“extraposed-to clauses”,and “modals and semi-modals except you and we as the agent”.Among them,the most frequently used are “modal and semi-modal with you as the agent” and “imperatives”.In general,the diversity and complexity of linguistic structures can enrich the students' pragmatic knowledge about speech acts,so as to improve their pragmatic competence in daily communication.