The article examines two series of English textbooks used in Finnish upper secondary schools, to see how much they reflect the ideas of three potentially powerful trendsetters: the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR), the national core curriculum, and the matriculation examination. The main impetus for the study was the fact that speaking skills, or oral pragmatic competence, are emphasized in both the CEFR and the core curriculum, but they are not included in the matriculation examination. The first analysis reveals a washback effect of the matriculation examination in the textbooks, and the second finds the that oral pragmatic instruction is not only rare, but it tends to be indirect and may therefore not reach student awareness.