Application Of Grice’s Conversational Implicature Theory To The Teaching Of College English Listening

Due to lack of linguistic knowledge and constraints of various non-linguistic factors(such as socio-cultural knowledge, listening habits, anxiety and motivation), Chinese EFLlearners have long considered listening as the most difficult skill to improve. In most cases,learners can understand every single word they hear, yet they still fail to figure out the realintention of the speaker. In other words, learners just grasp the literal meaning of theutterance and fail to interpret the implied meaning.The study attempts to incorporate Grice’s theory of conversational implicature into theteaching of college English listening, seeking to examine the teachability of the Griceantheory and the effectiveness of explicit instruction as one way to improve learners’implicature comprehension. The following questions are addressed in this study:1.What are the major problems learners may encounter in the process of interpretingconversational implicatures in English?2.Does explicit instruction have a positive effect on learners’ implicaturecomprehension?3. Does explicit instruction have different effects on listeners at different proficiencylevels? Is it more effective for high-proficiency listeners than for low-proficiency listeners?4.What are learners’attitudes toward explicit instruction in conversational implicaturesin English?The subjects were106non-English majors (Grade2012) taking the same sophomorecourse at the Inner Mongolia University of Technology.54students served as theexperimental group (EG), and52students as the control group (CG). Both groups weretaught by the same teacher in listening classes. The instruments comprise a copy ofpre-instruction questionnaire, a copy of post-instruction questionnaire, an implicaturelistening task and a listening proficiency test. First, both groups completed the sameimplicature listening task and filled out the pre-instruction questionnaire which is intendedto identify the major difficulties they may encounter in implicature comprehension. Afterthat, the CG followed the regular syllabus while the EG received explicit instruction in the Gricean theory (lasted for11weeks). In the middle of the semester, the EG was given thelistening proficiency test. Finally, both groups completed the post-test version of theimplicature listening task. The EG was also asked to fill in the post-instructionquestionnaire which is intended to examine their attitudes toward the explicit instruction.Main findings of the study are summarized as follows:First, most learners encounter five major difficulties in implicature comprehension,including low processing speed, failure to make appropriate inferences, insensitivity tosituational context, failure to recognize familiar words and failure to listen selectively. Inaddition, lack of inferential ability and non-linguistic factors can present a much biggerobstacle to learners’ implicature comprehension compared with linguistic factors. Second,explicit instruction has a positive effect on learners’ implicature comprehension. Third,explicit instruction has different effects on listeners at different proficiency levels. It ismore effective for low-proficiency listeners than for high-proficiency listeners. Finally,most learners tend to have a positive attitude toward explicit instruction in conversationalimplicature.