Application Of The Theory Of Conversational Implicature Into English Listening Comprehension Teaching In Chinese Senior Middle Schools

Owing to the importance of listening comprehension among the four basic foreign/second language acquisition skills, considerable attention has been given to the pedagogic method of improving listeners' proficiency.In China, there exist some problems in English listening teaching in Senior Middle Schools. Professor Wang zhongyan said: "In listening teaching, it is not unusual that teachers just play records without offering any hints". In listening teaching, listeners are only viewed as passive receivers without any hints. After listeners listen to a passage one or twice, teachers check the answers, and then play the tape sentence by sentence. However, listening comprehension is an active process.The importance of developing students' listening competence in Senior Middle School English Teaching is obvious. So far much work has been done at home and abroad to look for ways to facilitate students' listening competence. This thesis starts with a literature survey of the relative studies in the field, which indicates that students are faced with a lot of difficulties in their listening comprehension. One of their main weakpoints is the interpretation of conversational implicatures. Many students in Senior High Middle School have difficulty in understanding implications of English conversations as there tends to be a gap between what is said and what is implied. How to overcome this problem is an important aspect in the teaching and testing of English listening. The survey also reveals that most of the present researches are on the theoretical side or on the generalization of personal experiences rather than on empirical studies.On the basis of theories of Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature, an experiment is conducted to try to find a new way to improve students'listening competence. Through reforming the instruction model and focusing on training students' strategies and competence of implicature interpretation, the author wishes to find a way out which will help develop students' listening competence.The originality of this study lies in the attempt made by the author to probe the feasibility of teaching implicatures in Senior Middle Schools'English listening class, an effort to find a more efficient instruction model to teach listening.