Conversational Implicature Instruction as a Pedagogical Strategy for English Majors in a Chinese Context: A Pragmatic-Analysis of Its Effectiveness

Abstract

In English teaching, teachers have always attached great importance to exploring scientific listening teaching methods to improve students' listening comprehension ability. In order to improve the listening teaching mode, scholars in both China and in other countries have done a series of studies. However, there is little research on the effectiveness of conversational implicature in improving listening comprehension ability of English majors. Therefore, through empirical research, this paper explores the effectiveness of applying the Conversational Implicature Theory in pragmatics to instruct English majors to improve their listening comprehension ability, and tries to find an efficient teaching strategy of conversational implicature. The two classes are used as the experimental class and the control class respectively in this experiment. The experimental class adopts Conversational Implicature Teaching Strategy, while the control class still adopts the traditional teaching mode. The results show that the ability of conversational implicature inference of the experimental class is obviously better than that of the control class, which can effectively improve the listening comprehension level of the students. The results of the study provide some enlightenment for the implementation of conversational implicature teaching strategies in similar environments, and some suggestions for listening teaching of English majors are put forward based on the results of the study.