Evaluation of the four coursebooks used in TOBB ETU in terms of three speech acts: Requests,refusals,complaints

In a world where communication between cultures and nations gains importance with every passing day, English as a common tool for communication has been indisputably one of the most indispensable parts of this process. English language teaching has been in line with the current view on English itself; achieving communication through English has moved to the foreground for the last thirty years or so, replacing the role of having complete control of grammatical rules for language proficiency.This study set out to find out to what extent English language learners at TOBB University of Economics and Technology Preparatory School can perform strategies of three speech acts, which serve as an important part of everyday communication with English. The specific speech acts were requests, refusals and complaints and they have several ways to be realized through strategies. Data was collected from 90 students with a discourse completion task. The other aim of the study was to check the presentation of the aforementioned speech acts in the coursebooks used during the three semesters in the preparatory school program. So, second group of data was gathered from the coursebook evaluation phase, at which eleven coursebooks were evaluated in terms of their inclusion of requests, refusals and complaints.The study was designed as a descriptive one; the purpose was to take a picture of the current state of the problem and offer some solutions, if there were such a necessity. In the data analysis part, the frequencies of request, refusal and complaint strategies were identified both in the discourse completion task and coursebook evaluation data.The results of the DCT demonstrated that students at the TOBB ETU Preparatory School were able to perform requests and refusals more or less while their complaints were realized appropriately to some extent; the appropriateness of their complaints included less care than their requests and refusals did. A common point in their speech act performances was that majority of the answers lacked variety, which meant several specific strategies? always being on the top. Results of coursebook evaluation were common at some point with the results of the DCT. Although the frequency of requests in the books was not problematic, the refusals and complaints were barely included in most of them. They also had a paucity of various strategies not only in their contents, but also in their other parts such as exercises, audioscripts and so on.Key Words: English Language Teaching, Teaching Pragmatics, Coursebook Evaluation, Requests, Refusals, Complaints