investigating speech acts in iranian high school english books: the case of vision books

This study was conducted to examine the frequency of illocutionary speech act including assertive, directive, expressive, commissive, and declarative used in the conversations of the vision books. to fulfill the goal of this research, the researcher provided the mentioned books. then, she selected and counted all speech acts in the conversations to see which speech acts were more frequently used. searle’s (1976) speech acts model was applied to analyze the data. after counting the speech acts, percentage and frequency were used to arrive at the final findings. the findings showed that there were 222 speech acts in the conversations of the vision books. assertive (123) (55.40%), directives (60) (27.02%), and expressive (35) (15.76%) were the most frequent speech acts, respectively. there were only 4 (1.80%) commissive and no declaratives speech acts in the conversations of the vision books. the results of chi-square test indicated that the speech acts were not used equally in the vision books. the results of this study can bring about some pedagogical implications for english teachers, efl learners, and material developers.