Speech acts in English : from research to instruction and textbook development The present book looks into the main factors that have so far prevented a comprehensive and systematic treatment of speech acts in EFL textbooks and offers an alternative cognitive constructional account of illocution to improve their representation in EFL teaching materials. A revision of current theoretical approaches to speech acts has been carried out leading to the formulation of a comprehensive theory of illocution that brings together attested findings from each of the former. The analysis is based on evidence drawn from a corpus of real language data and is compatible with current psycholinguistic experimental knowledge on speech act performance. To bridge the gap between theory and practice this theoretical account of directives takes the form of a Cognitive Pedagogical Grammar of Directive Speech Acts that avoids excessive specialised jargon and provides ample exemplification to make its understanding easier for non specialists. Additionally a set of practical implementations has been provided to illustrate how the knowledge about the meaning and form of directives included in the Cognitive Pedagogical Grammar can be implemented in real teaching materials