A Study On The Application Of Neo-Conversational Implicature In Higher Vocational College English Listening Teaching

In current English listening teaching, most of the teachers only concentrate onanalyzing the surface structure or surface meaning of the language, which ignoresstudents’understanding of Neo-Conversational Implicature and blocks students’further development of their listening comprehension ability. Most of the studentsonly stay at the level of words and sentences understanding, and know nothing aboutthe Neo-Conversational Implicature. The research of pragmatics is to study theapplication of language. So the application of pragmatic theories in the process oflistening comprehension has great significance to improve students’listeningcomprehension level as well as pragmatic ability and communicative ability.Although many researchers have made researches and studies on how to improvestudents’listening comprehension ability, most of them concentrate on listening itselfsuch as listening skills and listening strategy training without giving sufficientattention to the content in which the listening materials are located. This thesisattempts to research on whether it is effective to improve students’listeningcomprehension ability to put the theory of the Neo-Conversation Implicature and itsincorporate principle into English listening class. The research is carried outaccording to the following three questions.1. Does the higher vocational college student with the knowledge of theNeo-Conversational Implicature behave better than the student without it?2. Is the higher vocational college student’s listening ability with the knowledgeof the Neo-Conversational Implicature relevant to their original listeningcomprehension ability?3. What is the feasibility of application of the Neo-Conversational Implicature inhigher vocational college English listening teaching?The experiment is conducted based on theories of“Neo-ConversationalImplicature”. In 16 weeks, the researcher gives the pragmatic instruction to theexperimental group, which includes the Neo-Conversational Implicature. Teaching methods involve the interpretation of the pragmatic rules and students’discussion.Research subjects are 120 second-year students from Rizhao Polytechnic who majorin marketing. They are divided into two groups randomly: the Experimental class andthe Control class. In the teaching process, the author gives the pragmatic knowledgeto the Experimental class and the traditional method to the Control class. Before theinstruction, the researcher gives a questionnaire survey to know about students’attitude toward English listening classes and the Neo-Conversational Implicaturelearning. The final results of the questionnaire survey show that students’attitude ispositive toward the Neo-Conversational Implicature. Then researcher gives thesubjects a pretest, and after 16 weeks, the researcher gives a post-test to the samesubjects, at last the data from the research are analyzed through SPSS. The results ofthe experiment show that the application of the theory of the Neo-ConversationalImplicature in English listening classes is indeed of great help to improve students’listening comprehension ability. The analysis of correlationship shows that students’interpretation ability of the Neo-Conversational Implicature is correlated to theirgeneral listening comprehension ability. Based on the findings of this thesis, somesuggestions are put forward on improving students’listening ability by applyingpragmatic theories to English listening classes.