Studies on Advice in ESL/EFL Textbooks in China

The goal of this study is to shed light on whether the speech act of "advice" in English textbooks used by Chinese learners is represented relatively well in respect to English native speakers- (ENS) intuition. We discover that in distribution of response types, there is a significant numerical difference between the two samples; that our textbook speakers deflect the advice in a very different way from the ENS; and that while the mechanisms of "mutually reinforcing exchanges" and "change of topic" to exit advice are frequently discerned in the ENS, they occur much less frequently in textbook dialogues. In addition, the textbooks contain no/little (meta)pragmatic information. Meanwhile, causes of these occurrences are explored and suggestions are provided to improve authenticity of textbook materials.