An Experimental Study Of Developing Conversational Implicature Comprehension Ability In College English Listening Teaching

In traditional College English listening teaching and learning, teachers and students focus more on the surface structure of the language detached from the context, which hinders students'understanding of the real meaning of the speakers. Pragmatics is the study of the language in use, giving much attention to the relations between language and specific context. So the application of pragmatic theories in the process of listening comprehension has great significance to improve students' listening comprehension as well as pragmatic competence and communicative competence.Though many researches and studies have been conducted on the improvement of students'listening comprehension ability, most of researches concentrate on listening itself such as listening skills and listening strategy training without giving sufficient attention to the.context in which the listening materials are located. This thesis attempts to investigate effectiveness of applying Gricean Theory of Conversational Implicature and Cooperative Principle to College English Listening Teaching to improve the students'listening comprehension ability. Accordingly, two research questions are put forward as follows:(1) Can explicit instruction of conversational implicature knowledge in College English listening classes improve learners'listening comprehension competence of conversational implicature? (2) Does College English learners'ability in conversational implicature comprehension correlate to their general listening comprehension ability?An experiment is conducted with 360 subjects in 7 classes to find out whether application of the theory of Conversational implicature in college English listening teaching can improve students'listening ability, with a pre-test and a post-test carried out before and after the experimental treatment. A questionnaire survey is done to learn about students'attitude toward listening class and conversational implicature learning. The results from the questionnaire survey show that students are interested in conversational implicature, and the results from the experiment processed by SPSS 17.0 show that the application of the theory of Conversational implicature in listening teaching does improve students'listening ability. Correlation analysis reveals that students'ability of interpretation of conversational implicature is correlated to their listening comprehension ability in general.It is concluded in the study that the application of Conversational Implicature theory to college English teaching is effective to help develop students'conversational implicature comprehension abilities in listening. Based on the findings of the study, some suggestions are put forward on improving students'listening ability by applying pragmatic theories to College English listening classes.