PRAGMATIC MEANING IN CUSTOMISED GLOBAL COURSEBOOKS: EVIDENCE FROM UZBEKISTAN’S GRADE 5–11 ENGLISH SERIES

Pragmatic competence, the ability to choose language that suits a purpose, a listener, and a situation, is now a stated goal of communicative English teaching. Yet textbook studies keep finding that coursebooks model language use without explaining it. This article examines how pragmatic meaning is presented in the Uzbekistan editions of two Cambridge series adopted for all state schools from the 2022–2023 school year, Guess What! (Grades 5–6) and Prepare! (Grades 7–11). In a directed qualitative content analysis, 849 activities from 21 units (three per grade, from the beginning, middle, and end of each book) were coded for speech acts, implicature and inference, and register, politeness, and genre, each marked as explicit, implicit, or not present, and for whether the activity linked pragmatic and structural features. Pragmatic content appeared in 227 activities (26.7%), nearly all of it implicit speech-act practice in pair work, model dialogues, and stories. Only 13 activities (5.7% of pragmatic activities) made a pragmatic feature explicit, against 10.5% of structural activities. Explicit treatment came mainly in writing guidance from Grade 7 and in functional phrase boxes in Grades 10 and 11, and even there the reasons for choosing between forms, such as the greater tentativeness of Could I have …?, went unstated. Implicature was coded in only two activities and politeness explained in one. The share of pragmatic content did not rise across the seven grades. The customised editions thus contain the same gap in explicit pragmatic information that earlier studies found in global coursebooks, and the findings point to specific places where teachers and textbook reviewers could fill it.