Directive speech acts in Finnish course books used in Hungary In the course of foreign language teaching and acquisition a specific problem soon occurs: The communication between people with different socio-cultural background may fail more easily than between people of the same cultural identity. Interlanguage pragmatics has investigated non-native speakers' acquisition and performance of specific linguistic action patterns. The main focus of these studies is on the cultural, social and linguistic factors: In which way the second language learners and native speakers realize different speech acts in their interaction? Linguistic politeness is also relevant in the study of foreign language acquisition. Linguistic politeness partly consists of the realization of different speech ac ts in the concrete utterance level. The use of different speech ac ts depends also on the context, in which the interaction is going on. From this point of view, it is relevant to investigate how different course books present the systems of speech acts, because course books are one of the very few sources of input in foreign language acquisition environment. Requests have, naturally, a very important role. The aim of my study is to investigate the directive speech acts in the course books used in Hungarian universities (Nuutinen, Olli 1987: Suomea suomeksi 1.; Lepasmaa, Anneli - Silfverberg, Leena 1987: Suomen kielen alkeisoppikirja; Kenttala, Marjukka 1998: Kieli kayttöön - suomen kielen alkeisoppikirja) from the point of view of interlanguage pragmatics. In interactions between native and non-native speakers the listener processes the utterances in his own linguistic system and will not necessarily understand the original intention of the speaker. The non-native speaker's grammatical mistake might be regarded by the listener as a pragmatic mistake, that is pure impoliteness or rudeness. One of the main goals of second or foreign language teaching should be to develop the communicative as weil as the pragmatic competence of the language learners, the central component of which is the appropriate use of language for different purposes in various social contexts. On the basis of thorough study of course books and the spoken language the efficiency of language teaching mjght be improved.