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.
The present study aimed to investigate the rhetorical organization of acknowledgements accompanying Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) dissertations written in English by native speakers of English and Turkish, and gain insights into the underlying socio-pragmatic proclivities. To this end, the macro-textual analysis of 136 PhD dissertations was conducted in light of Hyland and Tse's (2004) coding scheme. The findings revealed that more than half of PhD dissertation acknowledgements in both corpora consisted of only thanking move while the most commonly used step was thanking for academic assistance, followed by thanking for moral support.Moreover, the findings of the study also revealed that the acknowledgement section in PhD dissertations goes beyond being merely a part of a given dissertation and reflects social and cultural characteristics as well. The findings were discussed, and the implications were made.
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