An Action Research On Cultivating Students' Intercultural Business English Negotiation Ability Based On Conversational Implicature Instruction

As a result of globalization of trade and information, intercultural business negotiation ability is of growing importance for businessmen from various cultures. But Chinese business people often find it difficult to communicate with businessmen from other cultures due to the failure to understand the conversational implicatures of negotiation language. Thus, in teaching the course of Business English Negotiation, enough attention should be paid to learners'comprehension of conversational implicatures in negotiation language.This research is an attempt to instruct business English major students to understand conversational implicatures in negotiation so as to improve their intercultural business negotiation ability. In the theoretical framework of Grice's theory of Conversational Implicature and his Cooperative Principle, action research is designed for the instruction with Grade two business English majors as the subjects and one semester as a research cycle. The research steps are as follows:First, the subjects'major obstacles in business English negotiation learning are identified based on a questionnaire investigation and their ability to understand conversational implicature and initial intercultural business negotiation abilities are measured respectively by a pretest on conversational implicature and a pretest on negotiation ability. Then comes to the action implementation phase:1) instructing the subjects to understand and infer the conversational implicatures of negotiation language by analyzing the characteristics of negotiation language; 2) analyzing the conversational implicatures referring to contexts and cultural elements, and guiding subjects to deduce conversational implicatures according to negotiation examples and use them in simulated negotiations. Finally, posttests on conversational implicature and negotiation ability are used on subjects, and a further measurement of the subjects'intercultural business negotiation abilities is carried out by a final oral test of simulated negotiation.Major findings from data analysis indicate that all subjects have made great progresses in terms of conversational implicatures and their intercultural business negotiation abilities are correspondingly improved. The research results prove that the author's negotiation instruction based on conversational implicatures has been tentatively effective, from which conclusion we obtain the pedagogical implications that business negotiations are socially as well as linguistically structured, negotiation language should be taught in intercultural communication contexts with adequate efforts to enhance learners'awareness of conversational implicatures.