Refusing is a part of commissive speech acts. Refusing is a face-threatening act (FTA) that needs a good pragmatic competence since it probably gives risk to the interlocutor's positive or negative face. However, it indicates that people from various cultural backgrounds employ dissimilar refusal strategies. This study aimed at providing a comparison of refusal strategies used between Javanese Pre-service English Teachers (JPETs) and Sumatranese Pre-service English Teachers (SPETs) in accordance with different levels of power. The data were elicited from the DCT given to 10 JPETs and 10 SPETs. The participants were asked to fill the DCTs with written responses in which each DCT described different contexts and settings. Based on the analysis, JPETs and SPETs employed similar strategies in refusing to a request. The difference was only on the frequency usage of a certain strategy. Furthermore, all of the indirect strategies were applied to refuse a request meanwhile only a strategy comes from a direct strategy called the negation of proposition that is applied. A direct refusal strategy call bluntness was not applied. This study evoked pre-service awareness of pragmatic competence which could be taught to their future students and larger participants were encouraged for future study.

In recent decades, cultural content analysis of EFL textbooks has received a wide attention in ELT pedagogy. This research aims at analyzing the cultural themes, especially “little c” and culture categories presented in an English textbook used by Junior High School students in Indonesia. This study was carried out using Xiao’s suggested themes for detecting “little c” that represent food, holiday, lifestyles, customs, values, hobbies, and gesture/body language. Besides, it also investigated the culture categories proposed by Cortazzi and Jin, namely source culture, target culture, and international culture. The result showed that the presentation of the source, target, and international culture are in an imbalance proportion. The textbook’s content mostly exposes target culture and source culture. Meanwhile, international culture was not exposed. Moreover, value and food dominated the cultural theme in the textbook. Meanwhile, lifestyle and customs are less exposed. Furthermore, three themes of “little c” (holiday, hobbies, and gestures) were not exposed at all. Due to the imbalance proportion of cultural content, the textbook developers should provide a more balanced proportion of cultural contents in terms of themes and categories to help learners gain more knowledge related to intercultural understanding.