Observation On Chinese Implicature In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Implicature exists in all languages. It is traditionally divided into two categories: conventional implicature and non-conventional implicature. But they are too abstract to be brought to Chinese classes or to Chinese textbooks and also difficult for the foreign students to grasp.In order to get a better understanding of the existence of implicature in Chinese textbooks, the author observed 16 intermediate and advanced Chinese conversation textbooks and listening comprehension textbooks and 4 HSK reference books, and collected 451 example sentences containing implicature. After analyzing the examples, the author discovered that there are mainly 4 ways for the speakers to convey implicature: 1) by using figures of speech, 2) by using Chinese idioms, 3) by using some special expressions or sentence structures which contain some implied meaning by nature and 4) by employing some conversational strategies. The first two ways are comparatively dominant in the textbooks with smaller categories. Besides, the author made a survey on 57 foreign students'comprehension of Chinese implicature and she discovered that the Chinese language learner can understand Chinese implicature well (better than she had expected), though they didn't think it easy to understand, and they thought the first two ways are more difficult than the other two. It is also discovered that the time the students spend in learning Chinese has weak relevance with their ability to understand Chinese implicature. So the author has made some suggestions on how to develop the students'pragmatic comprehension in Chinese.