An Experimental Study Of College English Listening Teaching Approach Based On Conversational Implicature Theory

As is known to all that listening is a very important skill among the five basic skills in language learning. For quite a long time, in order to improve students’ listening comprehension ability, teachers try their best to help students remove barriers in listening materials and make them do a lot of practice, but Chinese students are still weak in listening, compared with reading and writing. The listening materials which need the listener to infer the speaker’s meaning actually increase the difficulty of listening. It is common to see that sometimes the students think they get the literal meaning of every sentence, but when it comes to understand the real meaning of the speaker, they still have a difficult time, especially when answering such kind of questions. In the author’s opinion, the existence of such questions has something to do with the traditional teaching model, which emphasizes more on the surface of the language, such as phonetics, but pays less attention to the development of students’listening comprehension ability. Therefore, students lack deep understanding of the language as a whole, which is especially true for the non-English majors in college. However, it’s not rare to see questions that need listener to infer the implied meaning in all kinds of English listening tests. Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature is one of the most important theories in pragmatics and plays a very important role in the study of verbal communication, providing people with theoretical foundation to understand communication in daily life, especially for those contain conversational implicature.Based on the students’questions in listening and the advantages of the theory, the author here tries to apply the Conversational Implicature Theory to the teaching of listening for non-English major sophomores to see the effects of such a teaching approach on students’listening comprehension ability and the reason why.71non-English major sophomores of Zhengzhou University participated in the Conversational Implicature Theory-based teaching study which lasted for one semester. Before the conduction of the teaching research, students’problems in listening comprehension from the perspective of Conversational Implicature Theory and their requirements on this course were obtained by means of interview, based on which a proper teaching plan was made. In one semester’s study, the author used the Conversational Implicature Theory-based teaching approach in the experimental class (35students), explained the listening materials from the perspective of the theory, and tried to improve their listening comprehension ability more effectively through three stages, which were the Preparation Stage, the Enhancement Stage and the Practice Stage, helping them form an inferential model step by step. While in the control class (36students) the teacher still used the traditional way of teaching, without mentioning the Conversational Implicature Theory.Through comparing students’tests performances, observing their responses in the class and interviewing part of the students from the experimental class after the conduction of the treatment, it has been found that students have many problems in understanding the conversational implicature in listening, and the teaching approach based on the Theory of Conversational Implicature helps students in the experimental class form an effective inferential model in the process of listening and with the use of some related listening skills or strategies, then they have more interests and confidence in English listening, thus their listening comprehension ability has been improved more effectively. Finally, based on the results of the study, some pedagogical implications are concluded, and limitations of the present research as well as suggestions for further researches are pointed out.