A focus on pragmatics : an evaluation of EFL textbooks in presenting suggestions

Abstract

In the past decade, many different English as foreign language textbooks under the label of communicative were easily found in any syllabus. Being communicative involves a number of different aspects including the teaching and learning of the pragmatic competence. Among the wide range of pragmatic aspects covered by textbook developers, one of them is an appropriate training on speech acts. In this regard, different researches (Mandala 1999, Salazar-Campillo & Usó-Juan 2002, Vallenga 2004) concluded that the sort of pragmatic input found in textbooks was poor and insufficient for the learning of pragmatics. However, a study conducted by Gilmore (2004) stated that such condition of limited pragmatic input was starting to change. Therefore, the present study aims at comparing old and recent textbooks in order to observe whether there has been any change in the presentation of speech acts. In particular, the present study focuses on the presentation of suggestions by analysing from a pragmatic approach, the textbooks activities that deal with this particular speech act. Moreover, it compares the variety of suggestion linguistic realisation strategies so as to evaluate whether textbooks focus on a wide variety of strategies needed to make suggestions or only a few of them. Results are discussed and pedagogical implications suggested.