The teaching of the pragmatics of disagreement through local primary English textbooks in Hong Kong

With the acquisition of English as a lingua franca (ELF) becoming a global trend, this is so for the study of English pragmatics for effective communication (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001). While many previous studies have investigated the instruction of the pragmatics of various speech acts, few have done so with disagreement as a complex speech act (Augouri & Locher, 2012). This study analyses the speech act of disagreement in Hong Kong children’s English learning textbooks on 4 main aspects: 1) the variety of disagreement strategies; 2) the variety of the contexts; 3) the amount of details in the contexts; 4) the appropriacy of the disagreement strategies. The findings suggest a lack of variety with both the mitigated disagreement strategies and their contexts, the presence of ambiguous contexts and an occasional mismatch between strategies used and the contexts, despite the high proportion of mitigated disagreement and contextualisation. A sample unit of lessons is proposed to investigate the problems identified. Recommendations, such as the application of a variety of disagreement strategies, are made.