REQUESTS AND APOLOGIES IN BUSINESS ENGLISH COURSEBOOKS – THE CASE OF BUSINESS RESULT
Keywords:
pragmatics, speech acts, requests, apologies, Business EnglishAbstract
Pragmatic competences, as part of Applied Linguistics, appear to be one of the hardest types of competences to be taught to learners, especially in EFL, ESP respectively. This has already been discussed in quite a bit research, and there are still doubts whether these competences can be taught through ESP books at all. Especially, when we talk about Business English, which as branch of English for Specific Purposes, pays more attention to building vocabulary in order to help learners ease their communication skills. This paper focuses on two types of speech acts, requests and apologies, as part of pragmatic competences.
The book that is analyzed, is Business Result, Elementary and Pre-Intermediate. The paper gives a general overview whether these two speech acts are presented enough in these two books, and furthermore, whether they are taught explicitly or implicitly. Based on my experience of using this book in teaching, and, another thorough analysis made especially for this research, it can be said that these coursebooks do not contain enough explicit materials for teaching requests and apologies, to students of Economics in any University that these books are used. There are other implicit, not so clearly suggested or observed exercises which aim to teach these two speech acts, but, that is not enough.
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