Compliment and Compliment Response in High School English Textbooks

Objectives The purpose of the paper was to analyze two speech acts (compliment and compliment response) in high school English textbooks and to find whether they were presented authentically and accurately according to L2 pragmatic norms. Methods Compliments in 8 differing textbooks were analyzed in terms of three aspects of compliment (syntactic structures, lexicals and topics), and compliment responses in textbooks were categorized according to four types of response (acceptance, amendment, rejection and non-acknowledgement). Then the analyzed compliments and compliment responses were compared with those acts made by English native speakers. Results Compliments in textbooks heavily relied on specific syntactic structures, used a variety of adjectives rather than a limited set of adjectives, and focused more on personality than physical appearance as compliment topics, which showed clear differences from what English native speakers do in their performance of compliments. Also unlike native speakers who prefer acceptance by responding positively to compliments, compliment responses in textbooks over-used non-acceptance strategies through refusal or non-acknowledgement. Conclusions Given these results, English textbooks should be developed based only on pragmatic norms of target language speakers, not intuitions or L1 knowledge of textbook developers.