Abstract
Speech acts have been thoroughly examined within the domain of pragmatics, yet they often remain inadequately treated in english as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks (Ren and Han, 2016). Studies indicate a troubling disparity between textbook depictions of speech acts and their spontaneous, real-world manifestations (Ishihara and Cohen, 2010). Pérez-Hernández’s Speech Acts in English, aiming to bridge the gap between research findings and their implementations in genuine classroom practice, is a systematic illustration of how research-informed and corpus-based realizations of six types of directives can be incorporated into classroom instruction and textbook development. Therefore, the book offers a theoretically updated and practically tested account of speech acts aimed at EFL professionals.
Pérez-Hernández initiates Chapter 1 with the significance of instructing the ubiquitous and ‘kaleidoscopic’ directives (p. 13), a potential source of interpersonal conflicts, thus rendering directives production a crucial and challenging task in the EFL context. Additionally, drawing on the problematic treatment of speech acts in existing textbooks, the author proposes a theoretical paradigm that incorporates the pragmatic, cognitive, and contrastive components of the illocution of directives. For instructional purposes, a hybrid method is introduced, utilizing language data from corpora search, existing studies, and daily encounters in both English and Spanish.
Chapter 2 serves as the book’s theoretical basis, proposing a cognitive-constructional approach to directive speech acts, an approach that emphasizes the identification of the speaker’s intended illocutionary force and the listener’s interpretation of a sentence’s semantic attribute. The chapter dives further into the intricacies of this approach by constructing an in-depth conceptual model, the Illocutionary Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) of directives. This model encompasses varied aspects, including ‘agent, agent’s capability, beneficiary of the action, speaker and addressee’s willingness, possession of the directive object, speaker’s need, assessment of cost-benefit, optionality, mitigation, and politeness’ (p. 51, author’s emphasis). With these attributes, speakers are empowered to differentiate between speech acts, outline their linguistic constructions, and account for variations in the explicitness of speech acts.
Compared with Chapter 2, which is theoretically innovative, Chapter 3 approaches the topic with a much more practical touch. By analyzing 10 textbooks tailored for C1-level learners, the author concluded that, quantitatively, there is a lack of systematic treatment of speech acts, as some speech acts repeatedly appear at both starter and advanced levels while others are rarely addressed. Qualitatively, the illocutionary constructions in the existing textbooks are highly polite and do not explicitly address other contextual variables. As for conversational structure, the author’s investigation revealed that textbooks seldom display examples of natural speech events. Adjacency pairs and preference organizations, for instance, are rarely acknowledged. Moreover, textbooks fail to pay attention to differences between the target language and the learners’ native language.
Drawing on textbook deficiencies, Chapter 4 is a reader-friendly elaboration of the ‘Know-What’ and ‘Know-How’ of six directives (orders, requests, beggings, suggestions, advice acts, warnings). Based on the illocutionary ICMs detailed in Chapter 2, the ‘Know-What’ section employs an interactive Q-and-A format to illuminate the inherent semantic and pragmatic attributes, as well as contextual factors, of these six directives. Regarding the ‘Know-Hows’, a statistically supported general distribution of distinct base constructions is summarized. Surprisingly, the imperative is the most common base construction, revealing the high compatibility of this specific sentence type. The final session of the ‘Know-Hows’ in each directive is a three-color comparison of base constructions between English and Spanish, promoting an inclusive bilingual analysis.
Studies have shown that explicit pragmatic instruction outperforms its non-instructed counterparts (Taguchi, 2015). In the instruction of ‘Know-What’ of the directives in Chapter 5, jargon-free explanations are first introduced to offer learners a clear picture of the target concept, followed by several conscious-raising and knowledge development tasks. The ‘Know-How’ section highlights scenario-specific and application-oriented activities focusing on base constructions and linguistic strategies via 14 hands-on classroom activities, including blank-filling, role-play, structured conversations, discourse completion tests, etc.
Overall, this latest endeavor in speech acts and their application in language classroom and textbook development is a theoretical innovation and a scientifically tested practical reference for language learners, teachers, researchers, and textbook producers. Firstly, the cognitive-constructional approach and the illocutionary ICMs deconstruct speech acts into manageable and understandable semantic and pragmatic attributes, facilitating differentiation between speech acts such as suggesting and advising. Secondly, unlike the previous examples that are intuition-oriented, a comprehensive corpus-based search equips the study with contextually-rich instances, displaying how natural language is realized in everyday contexts and literature works. Thirdly, the latter half of the book, with hands-on exercises based on statistical evidence, is pedagogically illuminating for language teachers and textbook developers. Furthermore, a notion of graded instruction is revealed by comparing the varied degrees of discrepancies in base constructions between learners’ L1 and L2. Fourthly, for researchers interested in instructional pragmatics, the overarching framework of the book serves as a research paradigm that flawlessly integrates research findings with classroom instruction and textbook development. Fifthly, the book’s diction is worth learning, balancing theoretical elucidation in Chapter 2 for researchers with accessible explanations in Chapters 4 and 5 for language educators and learners.
Meanwhile, it should be noted that the book would be more enlightening and teacher-friendly if a more logical presentation of activities could be displayed in the instructions of the ‘Know-How’ part. Additionally, as the study primarily relies on a corpus search of six directive verbs, it is highly possible that directives lacking these verbs be excluded from the data summary. Future research might explore more exhaustive methods that merge corpus search with pragmatic instruction.