Agreement and Disagreement: A Study of Speech Acts in Discourse and ESL/EFL Materials

Abstract

The purpose was to formulate a description of the speech act agreement/disagreement and the rules of use under which it occurs in native speaker conversation. This was done by surreptitiously recording natural conversation, transcribing it and examining it for agreement/disagreement. It was found that it occurred only as a response related to a prior initiation move and it occurred on a scale of politeness from the most polite forms of agreement to the least polite forms of disagreement. The description was compared to two ESL/EFL textbooks to determine the degree to which the presentation matched that of native speaker use. The result was that the textbooks presented formulaic expressions which occurred infrequently in conversations among native speakers.