AN ANALYSIS OF PRAGMATIC KNOWLEDGE IN ELEMENTARY CHINESE SPOKEN TESTBOOKS

Abstract

Based on theory of pragmatics, this article analyzes the types, frequencies and manners of pragmatic knowledge in three sets of elementary Chinese spoken textbooks. It is found that the main types of pragmatic knowledge presented in the elementary Chinese spoken textbooks are speech acts, contexts, conversational implicatures, politeness and conversation analysis, while the culture, deixis, and cooperative principle are not presented, which may be related to the level of the textbooks. Speech acts is dominant among all the pragmatic knowledge types in the elementary spoken language textbooks, which is because the current international Chinese textbooks are still compiled according to the outline of "structure-function-culture". The manners of pragmatic knowledge are relatively simple in the present textbooks, which mainly are examples and exercises, metapragmatic presentations should be paid attention to. From the results of quantitative analysis, it can be seen that the pragmatic knowledge in elementary Chinese spoken textbooks has the following problems: (1) the amount of pragmatic knowledge is insufficient; (2) it has not received enough attention from compilers and teachers;(3) the distribution of various pragmatic knowledge is unbalanced;(4) some pragmatic knowledge is not explained enough. Therefore we suggested: (1) to increase the amount of pragmatic knowledge and construct pragmatic knowledge as a whole; (2) to set up a pragmatic section and carry out meta-pragmatic descriptions, to combine multimedia to enrich the manners of pragmatic knowledge; (3) to increase the comparison of Chinese and foreign pragmatic knowledge; (4) to enhance the explanation of pragmatic knowledge, not only should consider "what it is", but also "how it is used".