Applications Of Conversational Implicature Theory To The Teaching Of College English Listening

In English teaching, listening teaching is playing a more and more important part. But enhancing the competence for listening comprehension is a long, continuous process. For many years, in order to improve the competence for students' listening comprehension, teachers have made many efforts to apply various methods. But the scores rarely showed apparent improvement. Facing these problems, the author thinks that what worth us to discuss deeply is how to improve students' listening ability effectively, so as to cultivate their pragmatic competence.As a subject that studies the relationships between linguistic forms and the users of those forms, pragmatics has an inseparable relationship with English teaching. Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory is one of the most important contents of pragmatic. The theory focuses its attention on the phenomenon of conveying more than what is said. In authentic situations, people usually tend to make use of conversational implicature in conversations because of different purposes. Therefore, in order to improve students' abilities of analyzing conversations, it is necessary to lead in such theories in college English listening teaching. Based on Conversational Implicature Theory, this thesis applies this theory to English listening teaching to enhance the competence of students' listening comprehension and improve their English listening level.The creative points of this thesis lie in the attempt made by the author to probe the feasibility of teaching implicatures in college English listening class through a case study, an effort to find a more efficient instruction model to teach listening. The experiment is conducted on the basis of theories of Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature. Through teaching pragmatic knowledge to the experiment class, the author wishes to cultivate the students' competence of inferring conversational implicature, so as to develop students' listening ability.This thesis consists of six parts. The first part is the introduction. It mainly deals with the background and the purpose of the study. The second part is a literature review of studying conversational implicature in perspective of pragmatic view. It gives a short survey of present situation of pragmatics and its applications. And it also makes a short introduction of the present situation of Conversational Implicature Theory both abroad and in China. The third part is the theoretical foundation of this thesis. It gives a deliberate introduction of Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory and Co-operative Principle, and the inference and characteristics of conversational implicature, and its new developments. The fourth part is an analysis of roles of conversational implicature in listening teaching. First, it tells the significance of studying applications of conversational implicture to listening teaching; then it gives an introduction of present situation of listening teaching; at last it analyzes the roles of conversational implicture in listening teaching from the perspective of phonetics and knowledge factors. The fifth part makes an experiment, based on Conversational Implicature Theory. The subjects are 200 non-English majors in Northeast Forestry University. The methods of the experiment are questionnaires and tests. According to the results, the experiment proves that the assumption of applying the Conversational Implicature Theory to English listening teaching is feasible. The sixth part presents the implications of this study and offers some applicable pedagogical suggestions for teaching implicatures in college English listening classroom. There are also some suggestions for learners. The last part is the conclusion. Based on Conversational Implicature Theory, this thesis uses the experiment to prove the instructive role of pragmatic theories to listening teaching. It's an effective teaching method to improve the competence of students' listening comprehension, so as to achieve the goal of successful communication.