Abstract
In this chapter, I will first examine the total number of the different speech acts contained in the 22 children’s books that I investigated. This will be followed by an analysis and discussion of the individual speech acts examined. I will begin with requests and responses to requests and will then address greetings and leave-takings. This will be followed by an analysis of expressions of gratitude, apologies, suggestions, and expressions of physical and mental states. I will then provide a summary of this chapter.
In order to show in-service or pre-service teachers what speech act input the picturebooks may add to the speech act input provided in the textbooks, I will begin each section which focuses on a particular speech act with a quick reminder of the textbooks’ results from Chap. 4 for the same speech act. This will enable readers primarily interested in the picturebooks results to see how useful (or not) individual picturebooks are with regard to providing additional pragmatic input on specific speech acts without having to constantly consult Chap. 4 in order to compare the findings.
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Notes
- 1.
Picturebooks and children’s books are used as synonyms in this book.
- 2.
Issues not related to pragmatics that teachers may wish to address with the help of children’s books are, for example, cultural phenomena (such as Thanksgiving or Christmas traditions), vocabulary items (such as vegetables, animals or colours) or prepositions (such as on the table, under the chair).
- 3.
Further information on the picturebooks, such as the names of authors, years of publications or the reason for why the individual books were included in this investigation can be found in Sect. 3.4.2.
- 4.
Both books do, however, contain a number of assertives/representative acts/constatives (cf. Sect. 2.1.3), i.e. statements or descriptions that are not focused on in this investigation.
- 5.
However, it needs to be borne in mind that this was partly due to the large number of instructions that are a typical feature of all textbooks
- 6.
If EFL teachers are wishing to expose their young learners to conversations that resemble authentic English language use with regard to speech acts, most of the picturebooks analysed will not be able to provide rich input in that respect. This means that teachers will either need to use other picturebooks that provide richer pragmatic input or resort to a different type of textbook-additional material altogether, e.g. tv programmes. More research on these alternative materials for teaching pragmatics to young EFL learners is needed.
- 7.
This table features only those books which actually contain at least one modifier. Thus, children’s books that do not contain a single one were not included.
- 8.
Readers familiar with The Gruffalo may wonder why the utterances included in the book that refuse invitations are not mentioned here. The reason for this is that I agree with colleagues such as Edmondson and House (1981), Leech (2014) and Margutti et al. (2018) who consider invitations to be an independent speech act, i.e. not a subcategory of a request. For this reason, invitations and responses to invitations are not included in the present analysis.
- 9.
The incorrect use of this leave-taking strategy as a greet category was discussed above.
- 10.
An overview of how the use of how do you do has changed over the centuries is provided in Grezga (2008). It should also be noted that in modern English the reply to How do you do is How do you do, i.e. the greeting is no longer considered to be a genuine question and should not be confused with how are you.
- 11.
Individuals familiar with different story telling techniques in L2 classrooms will of course be aware that books are not necessarily read to pupils verbatim, i.e. word-for-word. Instead, teachers may decide to paraphrase difficult words, or include interactive tasks that could feature more speech acts than were originally included in the children’s book.
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Schauer, G.A. (2019). Results: Speech Acts in Children’s Books. In: Teaching and Learning English in the Primary School. English Language Education, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23257-3_5
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