An Empirical Study On The Application Of Conversational Implicature Theory To College English Listening Teaching

Conversation listening takes an important role in listening part of CET-4and CET-6. For long, although English teachers have applied various methods in listening class, students’listening ability has not improved remarkably, which bores some teachers and students. Many students usually encounter this situation-even if they get the literal meaning of each sentence, they still cannot understand the real meaning and get the right answer. In the author’s view, all these problems relate to the traditional listening teaching, which emphasizes more on the superficial meaning of the language, such as grammar and phonetics, and overlooks the training of students’listening comprehension ability. Therefore, comprehending the implications and underlying meaning of sentences has become one of the listening teaching difficulties. But how to solve this problem?The Conversational Implicature Theory put forward by Grice provides an effective way to solve this difficulty. Grice (1967) states that in order to achieve particular goals, participants in conversations will observe certain principles, that is, Cooperative Principle; but for some reasons, people will deliberately violate these principles to give rise to the conversational implicature. Actually, under the guidance of the Cooperative Principle, listeners infer the real meaning of utterances on the basis of the literal meaning and the context. There are some studies which aim to prove the effectiveness of this theory on students’scores in English listening, but few studies are concerned with the respective effect on high-score and low-score group. The author of this thesis not only presents the application effect of this approach on the students’ scores in English listening through the analysis of the data obtained from the SPSS, but also makes further study for the effect on high-score and low-score group. The study aims to search for the answers to the following questions in order to prove the effectiveness of the Conversational Implicature Theory on non-English majors in Xinhua College of Ningxia University.1. How can Conversational Implicature Theory be applied to the English listening teaching among the students in independent colleges?2. Can the explicit teaching guided by Conversational Implicature Theory improve students’ listening comprehension ability?3. Is there any difference between high-score group and low-score group on the aspect of their listening ability and learning attitude towards English listening?The experiment was conducted in the second semester of the sophomores and lasted 14weeks. The subjects involved in this experimental study were60non-English sophomores whose major is Chemical Engineering and Technique. One class is randomly chosen as experimental class, the other is control class. To further study the respective effect of new teaching model on students of different levels,14students in the experiment class are divided into high-score group and low-score group according to their scores in the post-test. The post-test scores of14students’ are analyzed by SPSS and they should also be the interviewees who answer two questions. In one semester’s study, Conversational Implicature Theory-based teaching method was applied in the experimental class. The author analyzed the listening materials from the perspective of this theory and tried to improve the students’ listening comprehension ability through three stages-the Theory Introduction Stage, the Practice Stage and the Consolidation Stage, in hope of helping them form an inferential model step by step. While in the control class, the teacher used the traditional teaching method, without mentioning the Conversational Implicature Theory.Based on the data analyzed by SPSS and the analysis of the interview, the following findings can be obtained:The students in the experimental class outperformed those in the controlled class in listening comprehension, so Conversational Implicature Theory-based teaching method can improve the students’ listening achievements. From the results of the interview, compared with the traditional listening teaching, Conversational Implicature Theory-based teaching is more popular with the students. Moreover, this teaching model has positive effect on both the high-level and low-level group, but the effect on the former group is more evident than that of the latter one.