Incorporating Pragmatics in English Language Teaching: To What Extent Do EFL Course Books Address Speech Acts?

Abstract

Investigating the presence and presentation of speech acts in course books may be significant in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) environment since in most cases, students rely on them for pragmatic input. Though a large body of research has dealt with the speech acts, relatively little research has been conducted to examine the speech acts in English course books. To fill in this gap, this study aimed to investigate how complaints, apologies and suggestions were presented in EFL course books. To this end, a content analysis on 17 course books of different language proficiency levels (i.e. from beginner to advanced) was conducted to find out: (i) whether the course books included the aforementioned speech acts (ii) the range and frequencies of linguistic strategies used to perform these speech acts and (iii) whether their frequency showed variation across all proficiency levels. The findings have clear implications for course book writers, publishers and language teachers. The findings are presented and implications are made.