An Empirical Study Of Conversational Implicature In Improving English Listening Comprehension Of College Students

Nowadays, with the development of listening syllabus, listening tests have begun to focus on students'listening comprehension ability. The researcher finds that more and more listening items, which include the so-called"implied meaning", appear in listening materials of CET4 & CET6. Therefore, the importance of training students'listening comprehension ability has been highlighted in college English teaching. However, at the current stage, the traditional pattern of teaching listening (students listen to tapes– students do exercises– the teacher gives the answers) still occupy the dominant place. In a long period, the college teachers adopt various teaching methods in order to improve students'listening comprehension ability, but through the investigation, we find that the listening performances of students'have not been improved significantly after they solved their difficulties in grammar and phonetics. Through the teaching process, the author discovers that students are facing with many difficulties in the process of listening comprehension. One of the major weak points is the understanding of Conversational Implicature. To solve this problem, the author thinks that it is necessary and worth to discuss these problems---how to cultivate the students'language application ability, namely"pragmatic competence"and how to use this"pragmatic competence"to improve students'levels of listening.Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics, which studies the relationship between linguistic forms and the users of those forms. There is an inseparable relationship between pragmatics and English teaching. Conversational implicature is a significant theory of pragmatics. In our daily communication, in order to achieve their different purposes in authentic situations, people tend to convey their"real meaning"by making use of such"utterances"which contain"conversational implicature"in conversations. So in order to improve students'listening ability, it is necessary to apply Conversational Implicature to college English listening teaching. Based on Grice's"conversational implicature"theory, this dissertation aims at applying this theory to English listening teaching in order to enhance the competence of students'listening comprehension and improve their English listening level. However, reforming the instruction model and focusing on training students'strategies and competence of implicature interpretation, the author wishes to find out a way which can help develop students'listening competence.The experiment is conducted based on theories of"Cooperative Principle"and"Conversational Implicature". In 16 weeks, the researcher gives the pragmatic instruction to the experimental group, which includes Conversational Implicature and other relevant theories, such as Face Theory and Politeness Principle. Teaching methods and approaches refer to the interpretation of the pragmatic rules, students'discussion and creative practices. Research subjects are 166 second-year students from Luoyang Institute of Science and Technology. They are divided into two groups randomly: the Experimental group and the Control group. In the teaching process, the author gives the pragmatic instruction to the Experimental group and the traditional method to the Control group. The pragmatic instruction is as follows: the first step, teacher gives the interpretation of these pragmatic theories to students; the second step, the teacher plays the tape and gives the answers to students; the third step, students discuss over and practice on examples, and the teacher gives the feedback. Before the instruction, the researcher gives the subjects a pretest, and after 16 weeks, the researcher gives a posttest to the same subjects, then the data from the research is analyzed through SPSS.Findings from this dissertation are as follows. Non-English majors are really short of knowledge of linguistic theories and the students should be taught how to infer implicature to guide their learning. The English listening levels of the Experimental group and the Control group learners are same before this experiment. The independent sample T-test shows that there is no significant difference between these two groups. After the experiment, the scores of the Experimental group have been improved significantly. The independent sample T-test shows that there is significant difference between the two groups. The paired sample T-test shows that there is significant difference between the pretest scores and the post-test scores of the Experimental group. At the same time, the other paired sample T-test shows that there is no significant difference between the pretest scores and the post-test score of the Control group. These results indicate that improving teaching model and cultivating students'listening strategies can enhance non-English majors'English listening comprehension ability. Thus, we find that students need to learn much more knowledge of Conversational Implicature theory to guide their comprehension process. The experiment proves conversational implicature theory can serve as an effective teaching approach used in the listening practice.