Comparison of Agreement and Disagreement Expressions between Malaysian and New Headway Course

Abstract

Agreement and disagreement are common speech acts that many ESL/EFL learners have to perform when conversing or discussing their views with others. Studies have shown that language learners, especially non-native speakers find it difficult to carry out these speech acts and may therefore employ them inappropriately. Since course books are important tools to aid the acquisition of these speech acts, there is a need to investigate how agreement and disagreement speech acts are presented in ESL course books. This paper will, therefore, present a study that was conducted to determine to what extent the Malaysian and New Headway course books aid students in developing the pragmatics of agreement and disagreement by analysing how they are presented in these course books. Dialogues from reading texts and listening transcripts of the course books were analyzed and discussed. The findings revealed that there were some differences in how the agreement and disagreement types were presented in both Malaysian and New Headway course books.