Investigating speech acts in Iranian junior high school English textbooks
Investigating speech acts in Iranian junior high school English textbooks

Summary/Abstract: This study was carried out to examine the speech acts of Directives, Assertives, Commissives, Declaratives and Expressives used in conversation parts of Iranian Junior High School English Textbooks (Prospect One, Prospect Two and Prospect Three). The researchers selected and counted all the speech acts to see which speech acts were more frequently used. Searle’s (1976) speech acts model was used to analyse the data. After counting the speech acts, percentage and frequency were used to get the final findings. The results indicated that Assertives and Declaratives were, respectively, the most and the least frequently used speech acts in the Prospect Books. The Chi-square test results revealed that the speech acts were not distributed equally in the Prospect Books. The findings of this study can assist the material designers to include different types of speech acts in EFL textbooks in order to help the EFL learners develop their communicative and pragmatic knowledge.

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