<p>Active listenership is a conversational artefact of the high level of interactiveness between the listener and speaker, who co-create meaning and achieve confluence in casual conversations. Yet, active listenership does not seem to have found its way into mainstream ELT coursebooks. In this paper, I present a study that investigates the forms through which active listenership is realized in casual conversations in English and in EFL coursebook conversations. Using a corpus pragmatics approach, the forms of active listenership are extracted from a down-sampled version of the spoken British National Corpus 2014 and from a bespoke coursebook corpus, representing EFL coursebooks from Germany and Austria. The findings indicate that in both corpora, active listenership is realized through similar forms. However, upon closer inspection, this initial result only proves to be true for which-comment-clauses. Listener response tokens and sentence-completion routines show high levels of syntactical and lexical complexity in the coursebooks, which cannot be observed in real-world English. I conclude this paper with likely implications of this mismatch for the development of the L2 learners’ interaction skills and devise a set of four principles for the incorporation of active listenership into ELT materials to counteract the effect of those implications.</p>