Farahnaz Taheri - Department of English Language Teaching, Golestan Science and Research Branch,Islamic Azad University, Gorgan, Iran & Department of English Language Teaching, Golestan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Gorgan, Iran
Ali Derakhshan - Assistant Professor, Golestan University, Department of English Language and Literature, Gorgan, Iran

Textbooks are the center of syllabus and curriculum in classrooms, and they have an important role in English Language Teaching (ELT), but they rarely provide the required materials to acquire pragmatic competence. One kind of pragmatic information which has a vital role in foreign language acquisition is speech act with various kinds in communicative parts of textbooks. Therefore, the present study aimed to analyze three ELT textbooks, namely American Headway 2 (Soars & Soars, 1996), Interchange 2 (Hull,Proctor, & Richards, 2013), and Four Corners 2 (Bohlke & Richards, 2012), related to the teaching of functions to find out the frequency and types of speech acts. To do so, the present study used a descriptive approach based on Vellenga s (2004) framework to illustrate pragmatic information included in the above mentioned textbooks. The findings showed that American Headway 2 with 37% included the most pragmatic information and Interchange 2 with 25% was the poorest among the analyzed textbooks in this study. Therefore, it seems that one implication of this study is that the EFL/ESL textbooks are poor in metapragmatic information such as speech acts in their communicative parts. The analysis of interactive parts based on cultural and interlanguage pragmatics can help a textbook development so that the upcoming textbooks would be designed based on variety of linguistic forms and contextually rich opportunities for students of foreign language

Textbooks, Pragmatic information, Metalanguage