A Comparative Study On Speech Acts Of Primary School English Textbooks

The ability of communicators to understand and express with the appropriate language under a specific context is called pragmatic competence.But nowadays,teachers and students usually pay more attention to the form of language,grammar rules and sentence structure;It is often ignored that we need to understand accurately and express appropriately in real life experience.Many students fail to use English appropriately after years of learning.Which means the students generally have low pragmatic awareness and weak pragmatic ability in primary school currently.Course learning with textbooks is the main way for Chinese students to learn foreign languages.National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 Edition)points out that teaching materials are an important carrier to cultivate students’ core competence.For language learners,pragmatic knowledge,as an important part of language knowledge,is one of the important bases for developing language skills.One of the main reasons why language cannot be used appropriately is the insufficient presentation of pragmatic knowledge in textbooks.Therefore,on the basis of the curriculum standards,teachers should fully study the textbooks and use them well in an integrated way according to the students’ pragmatic ability.With the help of comparative analysis of textbooks and pragmatics theory,this study focuses on the pragmatic knowledge in the senior textbooks of Oxford English(Shenzhen Edition)and Oxford English(Shanghai Edition),which are commonly used in Shenzhen primary schools.Through the study,the author hopes to find out the answers to the following research questions: 1)What speech acts are presented in the two sets of textbooks and what is the proportion of each type of speech act;2)Teachers’ views on using two sets of textbooks to cultivate students’ pragmatic competence,and the actual teaching situation of speech acts.The findings are as follows: First of all,in terms of the knowledge types of speech acts presented,there is little difference between the two sets of textbooks.The speech acts of expressives and representatives are the most abundant.In terms of the presentation frequency,Shanghai Edition is higher than that of the Shenzhen Edition,but the distribution is more uneven.The quantity and quality of speech acts contained in the two sets of textbooks need to be improved.Secondly,because some teachers have limited understanding of the concept,type and function of speech acts,and pay too much attention to the examination,the development of learners’ pragmatic ability is not paid enough attention.Therefore,relevant teacher training needs to be implemented and strengthened,and the way to evaluate students’ performance needs to be improved.The research results of this paper have some reference significance for the textbook writers and the users of the two sets of textbooks.