The paper focuses on the importance of pragmatic competence acquisition in the EFL classroom and on the great role the textbook plays in this process. It provides the results of an analysis of five English textbooks used in the schools of Moldova in the first five years of pupils’ studying English. The results show that all the textbooks contain some implicit and explicit pragmatic information, which, however, is not equally distributed. Special attention was paid to the treatment of speech acts in the textbooks. The results show that the success of pragmatic competence development depends on several factors revealed in the paper.