In EFL contexts textbooks have a central role as a resource of the target language and culture. Textbooks control the program of a classroom, and without them, the process of coherent education will not proceed. Today, with the increase in the relations between the countries for business, businessmen need to use a single language to have an effective communication. Since English is Lingua franca, it is used for this purpose in most cases. Business English textbooks can empower learners to deal with the problems they may face in international business contexts. In international business communication it is vital to soften the harshness of our message, or in other words, mitigate our utterances. Being able to use mitigation devices is one aspect of pragmatic competence. In the present study, we have done quantitative and qualitative analysis of mitigation devices in the Market Leader book series. In the qualitative part the devices were classified based on speech events and an example of that device in a context was provided. Speech events are the activity of communicating by language. The devices that were analyzed are epistemic and non-epistemic disclaimers, hedges, parenetical verbs, tag questions, cajolers, shields, discourse markers, proverbs, deictic expressions, tense, mood and aspect. The present study confirmed the absence of shields and deictic expressions and showed that epistemic and non-epistemic disclaimers have the highest frequency.
