Authenticity of the speech acts in coursebooks: A study on requests and refusals

Abstract

To communicate appropriately with native speakers to maintain communicative tasks like ordering food or refusing to do a favor without any misunderstandings, learners need to acquire the sociocultural features of the target language (TL) pragmatic units like speech acts. One source of input providing the learners with these TL sociocultural features is the coursebooks they use in classrooms. This study’s goal was to explore the strategy types and authenticity of speech acts in second language (L2) Turkish coursebooks. To achieve this, request and refusal strategies in dialogues in three B2 level L2 Turkish coursebooks were identified and classified based on the type of strategies through content analysis. Following that, a coursebook authenticity questionnaire including these dialogues was conducted with 50 native speakers of Turkish asking them to rate how natural these dialogues sound natural. Results showed that the types of strategies in the investigated coursebooks reflect the natural use of direct and indirect strategies in Turkish depending on the politeness variables of power and social distance relationship between the interlocutors. It was indicated by the results of the questionnaire that while requests and refusals in the dialogues sound natural, they do not sound totally natural, meaning that there is still something unnatural in these utterances. Limitations and suggestions are discussed in the article.