On The Application Of Conversational Implicature Theory To English Listening Teaching

Listening comprehension plays a significant role in learning English. In the process ofteaching English, listening is the first step in communication, which is always regarded as thebasic skill for students. The statistics of Paul Rankin show that listening accounts for45%innormal communication which indicate that listening comprehensive is the most essentialability of the four fundamental skills. Recently, higher vocational colleges have improvedtheir English teaching level, but English listening competence of vocational college studentsare not satisfying, many students regard listening learning as a big issue for them. The authorfinds that in the learning listening, students always pay attention to learning vocabularies,grammar, and phonetics; sometimes they only grasp the literal meaning of utterance, but oftenmisunderstand the speaker’s real intention in the daily conversation.The innovation of this thesis lies in that many scholars’ researches on listening teachingstopped at the level of theoretical study, and some of them focus on the study of listeningstrategies and teaching approaches. In order to investigate whether conversational implicaturecan improve students’ listening competences, the thesis bases on pragmatics theory, appliesconversational implicature to higher vocational college English listening teaching.This thesis consists of six chapters, Chapter one introduces the background, purpose andsignificance of the study. Chapter two is literature review, which introduces the previousstudies of conversational implicature and listening teaching. Chapter three is theoreticalframework, which elaborates the theory of Conversational Implicature and relatedachievements, such as Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, and etc. Chapter four isexperimental study, which introduces the objective of the experiment, puts forward hypothesisand discusses how to design this experiment. Chapter five discusses the results of the experimental study and presents pedagogical implication and application of pragmatics theory.The last part is conclusion. Chapter six summarizes the major findings and proves thatconversational implicature theory can significantly improve vocational college students’English listening comprehension ability.