Abstract:

China’s Standards of English Language Ability (CSE) issued by the Ministry of Education of China in 2018 is the national language standard of teaching and testing English in China. The CSE document defines pragmatic competence with an accurate, classified framework. In fact, to cultivate students’ pragmatic competence, the textbooks in use are excellent sources which play a vital role in achieving this goal. EFL secondary students’ L2 pragmatic competence has been groomed in many ways and mostly by means of classroom learning of textbook contents. To date there is still a scarcity of EFL secondary English textbook materials research in regard to how materials play a role in the pragmatic competence of EFL secondary students. By adopting a mixed methodology, the present article reports a comparative study of three publishers’ textbooks of English: one UK textbook (published in 2017) and two of China’s textbooks (all published in 2019). The working analytical frameworks in the present study are based on Searle’s classification of speech acts and CSE. It is found that three publishers’ textbooks have performed differently and each has its merits in certain aspects in providing contents that are helpful to students’ pragmatic competence as well as demerits in lacking of doing so. For example, findings reveal that the UK publisher has excelled in sufficient and all five categories of speech acts in its textbook materials (reading and listening researched only). Based on the specific findings, this article offers realistic implications and suggestions to the three publishers in their future revised editions of English textbooks for EFL students. For instance, it is suggested that Chinese publishers should update its contents to focus on cultivating students’ pragmatic competence of understanding oral description, understanding written description and understanding written instruction.

Key words: pragmatic competence, speech acts, China’s Standards of English Language Ability, textbook of English