A Pragmatic Study on Primary School English Textbooks in Mainland China

Abstract

English pragmatic competence in primary schools of mainland China has received increasing attention and the related issues have become popular research topics, but most former studies are limited to classroom teaching and particularly few on English textbooks of primary school. This study makes a pragmatic evaluation on the current primary school English textbooks in mainland China by taking a set of popular textbooks as an example. Adopting Cooperative Principle as theoretical frame, it mainly investigates and analyzes the conversational interactions in the textbooks, and the statistics shows that the textbooks generally conform to Grice’s “idealized communication model”, but there still exist many “odd” utterances which violate the maxims of Cooperative Principle, especially the Q-maxim and the M-maxim, while do not produce any conversational implicature in Grice’s sense. It thus concludes the pragmatic features of the textbook as “low naturalness”, “singularity in type” and “weak culturality”. This study is expected to act as a move for further research in this domain and a call on further improving the pragmaticity of primary school English textbooks in mainland China.