<p>The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to examine the representations of three speech acts, i.e., requests, apologies, and compliments, within Taiwan’s junior high school English textbooks; (2) to investigate how two social variables, i.e., social status and social distance, were embedded in the three acts. The corpus comprised 90 dialogues extracted from the latest three versions of English textbooks used in Taiwan’s junior high schools. Each speech act was analyzed through specific dimensions: request strategies and modifications, apology strategies and patterns, and compliment strategies and topics. The findings indicated that the three textbook versions presented a restricted range of strategies across the three acts. Furthermore, they failed to provide a comprehensive distribution of the three acts within diverse scenarios of social status and distance. This study concluded by offering pedagogical implications aimed at addressing these textbook limitations.</p>