An Empirical Study On Conversational Implicature And Its Application Into College English Listening Teaching

Listening is one of the most important skills in ESL/EFL learning, The importance of listening is reflected not only in the increase of the proportion of listening comprehension in various kinds of examinations, but in the daily communication which is based on understanding of other's utterance. However, many Chinese students find it hard to enhance their listening comprehension ability. According to the survey, we find that students encounter many difficulties in their listening comprehension. One of their main weak points is the interpretation of conversational implicature. So far much work has been done home and abroad to look for alternatives to improve students'listening competence.The creative point of this study lies in the attempt made by the author to explore the possibility of applying conversational implicature to college English listening through an empirical study. The author chose 120 sophomores from Shandong University of Science and Technology as subjects. There were 60 subjects in the control group and experimental group respectively. By teaching pragmatic knowledge to the experiment class, the author wishes to find a more efficient instruction strategy to teach listening and cultivate the students'competence of inferring conversational implicature, so as to develop students'listening comprehension ability as well as their language use ability. It's hoped that this thesis can shed some light on future studies in this field.The thesis consists of six parts. The first part is a brief introduction to the background information of current listening teaching and purpose of the experiment. The second part offers a literature review of conversational implicature. It gives a short report of the study on listening and conversational implicature home and abroad. Chapter three is the theoretical basis which mainly introduces the theory of co-operative principle and conversational implicature, the nature of listening process and the role of conversational implicature in listening teaching. Chapter four offers the methodology which mainly discusses the construction of experiment:hypothesis and purpose of the study, subject, instrumentation and procedure of the experiment and the discussion based on the data analysis of the questionnaire and three tests. Chapter five presents some pedagogical suggestions for teaching implicature in college English teaching activities. The last part is the conclusion. With the guidance of conversational implicature, this thesis uses an experiment to prove the effectiveness of applying the theory to college English teaching so as to improve the students' listening competence.