Suggestions: What should ESL students know?

This paper describes the linguistic forms used to perform the speech act of suggestions in both real language and ESL textbooks. Comparisons between suggestions in two authentic settings in a corpus, professor–student interaction during office hours and student–student study groups, and six popular ESL textbooks, three old and three recent, were made to evaluate the extent to which textbook materials reflect real-life language use. Register differences between office hours and study groups demonstrate the contextual sensitivity of certain linguistic forms and the complexity of performing speech acts. Although the new generation textbooks introduce more linguistic structures for suggestions than the old generation textbooks, the discrepancies between real language use and ESL textbooks are still apparent. The author recommends that, instead of simply teaching lists of grammatical structures as decontextualized language points in monotonous drills and unnatural dialogues, ESL textbooks should include background information on appropriateness when presenting linguistic structures, provide classroom tasks drawn on naturally occurring conversations, and raise learners’ awareness of the different socio-cultural assumptions underlying various linguistic forms for the same speech act.