A01 cohe4573 01 se fm. Qxd

2
Advice:
A: [At a swimming pool ] Ow, it’s cold! You’re brave.
B: Just take the plunge. It feels good once you get in.
3
Joking/teasing:
A: [At the service-counter reception] When we got here there was nobody
waiting. Look at it now!
B: Gray Line drops off a bus load every hour.
4
Questions (showing interest in the complaint):
A: [Apartment handyman speaking to a tenant] I just got back from
vacation. Drove in this morning and got a flat tire.
B: Where’d you go?
A: Just to the shore.
B: Good time?
5
Examples from Boxer and Pickering (1995: 52– 4).

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1 4 8
T H E N U T S A N D B O L T S O F P R A G M A T I C S I N S T R U C T I O N
A: Well . . . and I had just had the thing plugged too.
B: That’s too bad.
5
Commiseration:
A: [Two students talking] I sat through yesterday’s class with total non-
comprehension.
B: Oh, yesterday was the worst!
Most textbooks focus only on direct complaints as expressions of negative
evaluation and dissatisfaction about someone in their presence. The
researchers claim that most of these textbook dialogues containing complaints
are based on the material developers’ intuitions and therefore contrived. In
their opinion, this kind of material does a disservice to L2 learners because it
fails to teach the positive rapport-building function of complaining.
L2 textbooks can be insufficient both in their sampling of pragmatics, 
as well as in the quality of the treatment of pragmatics even when it is
included. A more recent study of eight L2 textbooks (four integrated skills
texts for EFL and four grammar texts for ESL) demonstrated that these text-
books and ancillary materials for teachers contained little explicit informa-
tion about pragmatics (e.g., how difference in relative social status influences
the level of politeness in language).
6
There were few discussions of register,
illocutionary force (i.e., the intended meaning as opposed to the literal
meaning), politeness, appropriateness, or what would constitute appropri-
ate usage. Also, the range and number of speech acts contained in these
texts were fairly limited, and their treatment was largely unsatisfactory, with
little contextual information or explicit attention to issues related to prag-
matics. In addition, the teachers in this study rarely resorted to outside
sources to compensate for the paucity of pragmatic information in these
textbooks. Similarly, while implicit messages expressed through conversa-
tional implicature are common in our everyday interaction, few examples of
these were present in these ESL/EFL textbooks.
7
Even when implicature was
included in the textbook dialogues, the textbooks sometimes failed to flag
those messages which were conveyed implicitly and often did not point out
how the language and the context interacted to convey the message.
8
If we focus on the teaching of pragmatics in a foreign-language setting
in particular, we find a similar picture. For example, one study evaluated the
6
Vellenga (2004).
7
Bouton (1994b).
8
Bouton (1990).

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A D A P T I N G T E X T B O O K S F O R T E A C H I N G P R A G M A T I C S
1 4 9
pragmatics content in the five most commonly used secondary-school EFL
textbooks published in Japan.
9
The authors found this content to be limited
in terms of the amount of information on pragmatics, the range of situ-
ations, and the speech act expressions included. Moreover, the information
that was included did not appear to be very learner-friendly, nor did it seem
to trigger any noticing of the relationship between the linguistic forms used
and the context in which these forms appeared.
Another study focused on the language of requests in five EFL textbooks
in tourism published in Spain. The study found a scarcity of contextual
information for these requests that would help learners to determine what
would be appropriate language use.
10
The author contends, for example,
that these textbooks tended to neglect the presentation of modifiers that
would normally occur either before or after the requesting utterance. Yet
another study, which compared greetings in seven seventh-grade EFL text-
books in Japan and naturally occurring greetings in American English,
found that textbook materials tended to misrepresent naturally occurring
greetings.
11
The author also analyzed learners’ production of greetings and
argued that these materials were insufficient for developing learners’ prag-
matic ability.
Other researchers have focused on how the pragmatics of gendered lan-
guage is taught in Japanese language textbooks. Japanese norms of behavior
and language use are often considered highly gendered. For example, some
sentence-final particles, honorific particles, and personal pronouns tend to
be associated with femininity or masculinity. Studies of several commonly
used Japanese language textbooks found that in many of the textbooks,
these features were presented as representing either male or female language,
often in contrastive charts.
12
In addition, three of the textbooks stated that
females tended to use more polite and formal language. The researchers
argued that these descriptions, along with the lack of counter examples, dis-
regard the existence of gender-neutral forms, a wide range of within-gender
variability, and cross-gender usage found in natural discourse. This stereo-
typical depiction of gender in language use is not only inaccurate but can
lead to the reinforcement of traditional gender norms in the language, 
making the target culture seem more exotic and alien.
13
9
McGroarty and Taguchi (2005).
10
Usó-Juan (2008).
11
Kakiuchi (2005a).
12
Five widely used textbooks were surveyed in Siegal and Okamoto (1996), and then
seven in their later work (Siegel and Okamoto 2003).
13
Siegal and Okamoto (1996, 2003).

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