The Applied Analysis of Speech Act Theory in College English Teaching

The locutionary act is a speaking activity, which is a vocal behavior, and its contents can be sentences, phrases, words and so on to express a certain concept or meaning. The illocutionary act is an act carried out by speaking, which involves the speaker’ intention, such as assertion, doubt, order, description, explanation, apology, thanks and so on. The perlocutionary act is the effect of words for the listener, such as making someone angry or successfully persuading someone to do something. The following illustrates how these three different speech acts are organically linked through a concrete example: Suppose John was preparing to go out at night in cold weather; the mother said to him, "John, it's very cold outside." "the sentence itself that mother said (according to the requirements of English, the sound compose word, the word compose the sentence, and say with the correct tone) is locutionary act; the intention that mother said this sentence was to ask John to wore coat and then went out, this is illocutionary act; John heard the words of the mother, wore a coat and then go out, and that is perlocutionary act. It can be seen from the description of this above example that the locutionary act analyzes the literal meaning expressed by the speakers’ words, this is literal meaning, the illocutionary act analyzes the implicit true meaning of the speaker's through literal meaning, that is implication, perlocutionary act analyze that the speaker’ intention are understood by the listener and produce the effect, that is perlocutionary effect. 1. Brief Introduction of Speech Act Theory Speech act theory has been comparatively perfect after years of development; this concept has been widely used in many aspects of social life, and plays a huge role. Speech acts mainly include perlocutionary act, illocutionary act, locutionary act, which is the three themes of speech acts, illocutionary act have a key core role. At present, the College English teaching is relatively weak in speech act aspect, College English teaching still continues the teaching method of high school, and that is focusing on the learning and mastering of basic knowledge of English, important points is still words, grammar learning and article comprehension, but English as language teaching projects, learners are needed to apply it into to their daily lives directly, and further deepen their understanding and master for English knowledge in the actual application process. In order to guide students to effectively study and establish a foundation for English courses, the importance and the key of speech act theory must be fully understood. By applying the speech act theory to college English teaching, it can make students realize the speech nature of language, then guide the students to develop scientific learning methods and contents in the daily learning process for their own learning situation, appropriately strengthen the learning content and training content of language expression, ultimately considerably improve their own language expression skills, and it is the only way to learn language, it have a key role for using English communicate with others effectively. One of the ultimate goals of English learning is to help learners to complete communication with others in English, and achieve the desired communication purpose. Speech act theory belongs to the category of psychology, and speech act theory is an important theory in the pragmatic study of language. It was originated with the British philosopher John Austin in the late 50’s of the 20th century. According to speech act theory, we are performing actions when we are speaking. According to speech act theory, a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking: locutionary act (the act of uttering words, phrases, and clauses), illocutionary act (the act of expressing the speaker’s intention) and perlocutionary act (the act performed by or resulting from saying something). 3rd International Symposium on Social Science (ISSS 2017) Copyright © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 61