PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF EFL TEXTBOOKS: THE EXPLICIT REPRESENTATION OF SPEECH ACTS IN SENIOR HIGH TEXTBOOKS IN CHINA

Abstract

This article reports on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a series of seven senior high English textbooks used in China with a particular focus on their representation of speech acts. The detailed analysis focused specifically on the extent to which speech acts are covered, the range and distribution of speech act, and whether adequate contextual and meta-pragmatic information is provided to facilitate the learning of speech acts. The findings show that speech acts are still under-represented in the seven books. The range of speech acts is rather limited, some highly-conventional speech acts are excluded, and the distribution of speech acts across textbooks is neither patterned nor justified. It seems that the authors contrived textbooks based on their native intuitions rather than research-informed data. Although apparent change takes place in the availability of a repertoire of linguistic structures for most speech acts, the way speech acts presented in the seven textbooks still falls short of ideal expectations. The textbooks attempt to simplify speech act instruction to lists of grammatical structures and obscure the complex context-dependent nature of speech act realization. Little or no information about the contextual variables is explicitly provided when a particular speech act is embedded in model dialogues, nor is there adequate meta-pragmatic explanation with respect to the appropriate realization or level of formality of different linguistic structures in various social contexts. The implications of these results for educational managers, textbook developers, and teachers will be mentioned.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0264/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>