Use Of Speech Acts In English Textbooks At Secondary Level In Punjab

Abstract

Pragmatic competence has emerged as a vital element of modern language pedagogy. This paper investigates how pragmatic content, specifically speech acts, are linguistically incorporated in ESL textbooks at the secondary level in Punjab. A detailed analysis focused on the categories of speech acts and their modifications in various texts, as[1] well as whether adequate contextual and metapragmatic information is provided to facilitate the learning of these speech act categories. The data for analysis is comprised of 9th and 10th English textbooks. The primary data source is utterances taken in the form of phrases, and sentences from the textbooks. The analytical framework proposed by Searle (1976) is adopted to manually annotate the data in the UAM corpus tool. The outcomes reveal that the pragmatic content is underrepresented in both textbooks. The contextual constraints are generally communicated explicitly rather than implicitly, and the highly uttered speech acts were assertive (35.45%/36.31%), directive (54.7%/58.9%), and expressive (8.24%/3.8%). It has also been noticed that many categories are not even dealt with and the uttered speech acts are based on the author’s intuition. Moreover, this paper highlights the unequal distribution of pragmatic content and underscores the dire need for a pedagogical shift towards a language curriculum that is contextually and communicatively richer to foster pragmatic competency in the textbook material.