Investigating the Linguistic Forms of Speech Acts In "Iraq Opportunities" Series

Abstract

The development of Pragmatic rules of language use is very important for language learners. So, it is necessary to teach the foreign learner how to use language effectively as well as how to distinguish between the form and the function of it because failure to do so may cause users to misuse as well as miscomprehend the target language. Thus, the present study aims at analyzing the conversation sections of "Student's Book 8" which is one of the activities in "Iraq Opportunities" series that have been taught in Iraqi schools. The study deals with linguistic forms functions and speech acts presented in this textbook to find out whether it is pragmatically competent or not. The adopted model is Searle's (1976) classification of speech acts, i.e. representatives, directives, expressives, commissives and declaratives. It is a quantative study to find out the number and percentages of the linguistic forms, functions of language forms and speech acts class in the written conversation sections of this textbook.
The findings and conclusions indicate that the textbook under inquiry has an adequate number of language forms that are used to express speech acts. This proves that the textbook facilitate the process of learning pragmatic competence, i.e.  those related to speech acts. The dominant linguistic form is declarative sentences. Its percentage is 51.4%. The main act (function) is that of giving information. It scores a percentage of 36.1%. Representative speech act is the major in the analyzed conversations. It scores 116 times (57.4%).  The lowest percentage is that of declarative sentences it scores (0.5%) and this indicates that the distribution of linguistic forms and their functions are not equal.