Enhancing efl learners communicative competence through the concept of conversational implicature m a 60 14 10

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES _________________ ENHANCING EFL LEARNERS’ COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE THROUGH THE CONCEPT OF CONVERS

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF HO CHI MINH CITY

UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

_

ENHANCING EFL LEARNERS’

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE THROUGH THE

CONCEPT OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS (TESOL)

Submitted by

Supervisor:

NGUYỄN HOÀNG TUẤN, Ph.D.

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2008

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:

ENHANCING EFL LEARNERS’

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE THROUGH THE CONCEPT OF

CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE

In terms of the statement of Requirements for Thesis in Master’s Programmes

issued by the Higher Degree Committee

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2008

Nguyen Ai Hoang Chau

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS

I hereby state that I, Nguyen Ai Hoang Chau, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating

to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library

In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for the purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses

Ho Chi Minh City, June 2008

Nguyen Ai Hoang Chau

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

Firstly, I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Dr Nguyen Hoang Tuan for his enthusiastic guidance, valuable comments and support in the preparation until the completion of this thesis

Secondly, I would also like to thank all my lecturers at the Department of English Linguistics and Literature, Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities of this Master course

Thirdly, I particularly appreciate my colleagues and first-year majors in English at Bac Lieu University for their valuable support and cooperation in helping me to carry out the survey questionnaire Especially, I

non-am very grateful to my first-year English non-majors who participated in my

research Their valuable cooperation plays an important role in conducting this thesis

Finally, my very heartfelt gratitude is sent to my family members for their moral support during the time I have done this study

ABSTRACT

Pragmatic competence, like linguistic competence, is an organic part of communicative competence However, teaching pragmatic competence is considered to be neglected in English Language Teaching in Vietnam This research is intended to investigate whether it may be effective to teach the pragmatic concept of conversational implicature to Vietnamese EFL university students

A total of 90 university students participated in this research There were two kinds of tests given to them: a multiple choice test (MCT) and a sentence writing test (SWT) The subjects were divided into two groups:

Experimental group: receiving instruction of conversational implicature through the combination of implicit and explicit teaching

Control group: receiving no treatment

The results of the pre-test, the post-test and the delayed post-test (the post-test given three months after the treatment) indicated that:

1 The experimental group outperformed the control group, at least temporarily

2 The subjects extracted some types of conversational implicature more easily than the others And they scored higher for some types than for the others

3 There was a disparity between the interpretation and the production of conversational implicature by the subjects

The pedagogical implications that teachers should keep in mind are:

1 Teaching the concept of conversational implicature through the combination of implicit and explicit instruction to EFL learners in Vietnam is highly facilitative Particularly, Vietnamese EFL learners can recognize and apply conversational implicature in communication from the combination of implicit and explicit teaching

2 Types of conversational implicature should be selected suitable for the proficiency level of the students in teaching pragmatic knowledge

3 Differences between L1-based and L2-based pragmatic knowledge are very crucial in the EFL instruction of pragmatic knowledge

The pedagogical recommendations for the teachers at Bac Lieu University are:

1 The concept of conversational implicature should be taught in Bac Lieu University through the combination of implicit and explicit education This can be done through some pieces of language material in the textbook of Know-How with some alteration and implementation

2 The teaching of conversational implicature at Bac Lieu University should be done frequently

3 Other pragmatic concepts should be dealt with besides the concept of conversational implicature in the development of EFL students’ communicative competence in Bac Lieu University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of original ……… i

Retention and use of the thesis ……… ii

Acknowledgements ……… iii

Abstract ………iv

Table of contents ……… vi

List of tables ……… x

List of charts ……… xii

Abbreviations ……… xiv

Chapter One: Introduction

1 Background to the study ……… 1

2 Purpose of the study ……… 6

3 Research questions ……… 7

4 Hypotheses …… ……… 7

5 Significance of the study ……… 8

6 Definitions of terms ……… 8

7 Limitations ……… 9

8 Delimitations ………9

9 Data Analysis ……… 9

10 The structure of the report ………10

Chapter Two: Review of the Literature 1 Conversational implicature……… 11

1.1 Grice’s theory ……… 11

1.1.1 The cooperative principle ……… 11

1.1.2 Conversational Implicature ……… 15

1.1.3 Examples of Conversational Implicature ……… 17

1.2 Kinds of Conversational Implicature……… 21

1.3 Properties of Conversational Implicature.……… 23

1.4 Conversational Implicature vs Conventional Implicature ………… 25

2 Previous Studies … ……… 27

2.1 Bouton’s studies ……… 27

2.2 Kobuta’s study ……… 28

Chapter Three: Methodology

1 Methodological issues ……… 31

2 Study setting … ……… 32

3 Study design ……… 33

3.1 Subjects ……… 33

3.2 Instrumentation ……… 34

3.2.1 Tests ……… 34

3.2.1.1 Test A ……… 34

3.2.1.2 Test B ……… 35

3.2.2 Lessons ……… 36

3.2.2.1 Format ……… 37

3.2.2.2 Timing ……… 38

3.2.2.3 Handouts ……… 38

3.3 Procedures of data collection … ……… 40

3.4 Data analysis ……… 43

Chapter Four: Results and Discussion

1 Results ……….……… 44

1.1 Test A ……… 44

1.2 Test B ……… 55

2 Discussion ……… 65

2.1 Test A ……… 66

2.2 Test B ……… 67

Chapter Five: Conclusions and recommendations 1 Conclusions ……… 69

2 Pedagogical recommendations ……… 71

Bibliography ……… 78

Appendixes Appendix A: Tests ……… ……… 81

Appendix B: Handouts ……….……… 84

Appendix C: Questionnaire for students ……… 96

Appendix D: Questionnaire for teachers ……… 102

Table 8 Results of the T-test for the MCT posttest session and the MCT

delayed posttest session in the experimental group ……… 53

Table 9 Frequency of correct responses for the items of the MCT

in groups and sessions ……… 54

Table 10 SWT scores in groups and sessions ……… 57 Table 11 Means and standard deviations by groups and sessions in

Table 17 Results of the T-test for the SWT posttest session and the SWT

delayed posttest session in the experimental group ……… 64

Table 18 Frequency of correct responses for the items of the SWT

in groups and sessions ……… 65

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Comparison of mean scores between two groups in

MCT sessions ……… 48 Figure 2 Comparison of mean scores among MCT sessions in

the control group……… 50 Figure 3 Comparison of mean scores among MCT sessions in the experimental group ……… 52 Figure 4 Comparison of mean scores between two groups in

SWT sessions ……… 48 Figure 5 Comparison of mean scores among SWT sessions in

the control group……… 50 Figure 6 Comparison of mean scores among SWT sessions in the experimental group ……… 52

ABBREVIATIONS

BLU : Bac Lieu University

EFL : English as a foreign language

ESL : English as a second language

FL : Foreign Language

JFL : Japanese as a Foreign Language

L1 : First Language

L2 : Second Language

MCT : Multiple Choice Test

MOET : The Ministry of Education and Training

SL : Second Language

SWT : Sentence Writing Test

TOEFL : Test of English as a Foreign Language

Chapter one INTRODUCTION

1 Background to the study

Together with Vietnam’s open-door policy, doi moi, which came into existence in

1986, English has been reemerging as the most important foreign language after the domination of Russian for many years Especially, the fact that Vietnam became the 150thmember of the biggest business organization in the world, the WTO (World Trade

Organization), following the trend of globalization in early 2007 further justifies that English is now the dominant foreign language in Vietnam The shift from Russian to English is very important in the government’s educational policy but the fact that there is

a change from the emphasis on grammar and translation to the emphasis on the communicative competence in foreign language teaching and learning is more important

It is the main reason for this shift that people who can communicate in English are badly needed for the open-door policy while the traditional way of English teaching has proven

to be a failure To put this policy into reality, the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has replaced all the textbooks of English for high school students (from grade 6 to grade 12) At the university level, much effort has been done to help students of English to develop their communicative competence all over the country As a result, there is less public complaint about students’ ability to communicate in English than there was about fifteen years ago

However, the emphasis has been mainly on the linguistic competence while very little attention has been paid to the pragmatic competence In high schools, students are hardly given any opportunities to develop their pragmatic competence In universities only English majored students are taught pragmatics English non-majored students are completely neglected Kasper (1997, as cited in Edwards & Csiceùr, 2004: 17) believes that pragmatic competence is not a piece of knowledge additional to the learners’ existing grammatical knowledge, but is an organic part of the learners’ communicative competence Therefore, this big disparity between grammatical and pragmatic competence in the EFL teaching in Vietnam has led to the problem that many learners of English even advanced ones lack necessary pragmatic competence, which certainly leads

to the deficiency in their communicative competence This problem has already been pointed out by Bardovi-Harlig, Hartford, Mahan-Taylor, Morgan, and Reynolds (1996, as cited in Melinda & Kata, 2004: 17):

Speakers who do not use pragmatically appropriate language run the risk of appearing uncooperative at the least, or, more seriously, rude or insulting This is particularly true

of advanced learners whose high linguistic proficiency leads other speakers to expect concomitantly high pragmatic competence (p 324)

The pragmatic notion “conversational implicature’ is very important in daily conversations Grice (1989) believes that in a conversation the speaker sometimes implies something beyond what he really says for some reason so the listener has to draw out what the speaker actually means In Vietnam there is very little classroom-based instruction to help students to develop their pragmatic competence except that pragmatics

is taught as a theoretical subject to third or forth year students of English major so conversational implicature is almost neglected in the EFL teaching As a result, English conversational implicature is troublesome for many Vietnamese EFL learners Many learners, for example, complain that they usually have difficulty in identifying correct answers for TOEFL questions of inference which usually cover some kinds of conversational implicature

In Bac Lieu University (BLU), where the study was conducted, the teaching situation is just identical No attention has been paid to the development of pragmatic competence for English non-majored students According to a survey conducted by the researcher through questionnaires (see Appendix) all of the ten teachers of English asked to give their opinion about pragmatic development admitted that they had never tried developing their students’ pragmatic competence And all of the one hundred students asked said that they had been taught neither the concept of conversational implicature nor any other pragmatic concept in high school as well as in university

Although the ten teachers confirmed that they had never taught the concept of conversational implicature to their students, they still believed that knowledge of conversational implicature is important in developing communicative competence They all believed that helping to develop students’ pragmatic competence is as important as helping to develop their linguistic competence Six out of the ten teachers thought that students could pick up the knowledge of English conversational implicature through communication without education while the rest did not However, nine teachers believed that it would be better to teach the concept of conversational implicature to students than let them pick it up Only one teacher thought that both ways were beneficial

Thirty-five out of one hundred students said that they had encountered at least one example of English conversational implicature whereas sixty-five students had not

Eighteen out of the thirty-five students who had encountered at least one example said that they could interpret the implication They all agreed that knowledge of English conversational implicature is important in developing communicative competence and thought that this pragmatic concept should be taught to Vietnamese university students of EFL (English non-majored students) Twenty-seven students believed that students could pick up the knowledge of English conversational implicature through communication without instruction Eighteen students thought that both ways were beneficial

Studies on teaching pragmatic aspects of the L2 have come to the conclusion that pragmatic aspects are teachable (Kasper and Rose, 2001) There were several studies

on the instruction of pragmatic knowledge in various learning contexts and different target languages for investigation They investigated the teachability of different aspects of pragmatics such as different speech acts, pragmatic routines, conversational implicature These studies involved students of different proficiency levels, as seen in the following table (for a complete review, refer Kasper, 2001)

& Thananart, 1

Fukuya, 1998 downgraders int Mixed-ESL

Pragmatic aspect Proficiency Language

tt, pragmatic routines int German-EFL

a, compliments hen, apologies adv Hebrew-EFL

ersion FL

tt, pragmatic routines beg English-German

implicature int Japanese-EFL pragmatic fluency adv German-EFL

997 (requests)

Moreover, recently Lid

examined the effects of instruction on the development of French interactional norms

by Australian

plays in a pretest/posttest design with an intervening four-phase instructional treatment consisting of awareness raising, narrative reconstruction, production and feedback and a delayed posttest conducted one year later Their study yielded the finding that th

production of

school students who were divided into a treatment group of 66 and a control group of

ched for evidence of the effect of instruction on lea

998 sociopragmatics high int Mixed-ESL thanks, apologies, high beg English-Spanish commands, requests FL

k, mitigators (requests) int./adv Mixed-ESL

opening and closing speech acts The subjects were 92 Hungarian high

ent was a four week program of fou This study followed a pretest/posttest design The format of the pretest

as a role play in which the students, working in pairs, had to solve a ach an agreement without seeing their peer’s role card The pre and lays w

To my knowledge, only two researchers who conducted interventional studies on L2 pragmatic development have sear

rners’ acquisition of conversational implicature so far Bouton (1994) examined the effect of instruction on ESL learners’ development of conversational implicature in the USA Kubota (1995) conducted a study on the teachability of conversational implicature to Japanese EFL students These studies will be discussed in details in chapter two

In Vietnam there have not been any researches conducted in this matter as far as I aconcerned EFL textbooks issued by the MOET do not deal with conversationimplicature as a whole Furthermore, as far as I know among the EFL textbooks on tmarket in Vietnam only TOEFL materials provide examples of conversationimplicature but they are used only for the listening test

It is very necessary to conduct this study in Vietnam in this situation

2 Purpose of the study

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the concept of conversationimplicature can be teachable to Vietnamese university students of EFL (English nonmajored students) in order to enhance EFL learners’ communicative competence It now quite clear to all teachers that the ultimate aim of teaching a language is to hedevelop students’ communicative competen

control group in posttest 1 and

The following two research questions guide this study:

Research question (1): Can Vietnamese EFL students recognize and apply Englisconversational implicature in communication from the combination of implicit anexplicit instru

Research question (2): How effective will treatment be on a long term basis?

4 Hypotheses:

The previous studies (Bouton, 1994 and Kobuta, 1995) on the instructional effect of conversational implicature provide a sufficient basis for the following hypotheses:

H1: The experimental group would outperform the

sttest 2(delayed posttest) It is hypothesized that the treatment would

effect Previous studies (B

ups which received instruction of conversational implicature outperformed the comparison groups which were not taught the concept of conversational implicature

H2: The experimental group would respond significantly better in posttest 1 than in the

pretest

H3: The experimental group would respond significantly better in posttest 2 than in the

pretest

H4: The experimental group would respond significantly better in posttest 1 than in

va

is dealt with research question (1), while hypotheses 2-4 are related to res

ped rticular, no research has been conducted in the teachability of conversational xperiment conducted in Vietnam

of language has on other participants in the act of co

by Bachman and Palmer (1996, as cited in Kimberly & Carsten in Rose & Kasper, 2001: 64) who defines that communicative competence is the language co

sttest 2 There were no classes between the treatment an

cation It seems that all the subjects had no opportunities to hear and use the target points in an EFL environment like Vietnam So, it is hypothesized that the effect of instruction would disappear

Hypotheses 2, 3 and 4 are motivated by Kobuta (1995)

Hypothesis 1

earch question (2)

5 Significance of the study

The results of this study may further justify the teachability of pragmatic competence

in an EFL learning context Moreover, what is more important is that they may prove that teaching pragmatic competence can be done through the combination of implicit and explicit teaching especially in EFL teaching environment besides the proved fact that pragmatic competence (conversational implicature in this case) can be develoseparately by either implicit education or by explicit education

In pa

implicature in Vietnam to the best of my knowledge This research will, thus, be the pioneer e

6 Definitions of terms

Pragmatics: Crystal (1997, as cited in Kasper & Rose, 2001: 2) defines that

pragmatics is “the study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use

mmunication.”

Pragmatic competence and communicative competence: A definition that appeals

to me has been offered

mpetence which includes organizational competence and pragmatic competence Organizational competence is subdivided into grammatical competence (vocabulary,

syntax, morphology, phonology) and textual competence (cohesion/coherence, rhetorical organization) Pragmatic competence consists of sociolinguistic and illocutionary competence

7 Limitations

The research aims at examining the teachability of the concept of conversational implicature to EFL learners in Vietnam However, only six types of conversational implicature were included in this investigation Also, this research included only two tests

en tests The activities constructed for the treatment were all wr

will be the statistic software used to analyze all the scores from the three

he multiple choice test (MCT) and the sentence writing test (SWT)

10

nal Implicature

Results and Discussion

sions and Recommendations

and they were all writt

itten ones, too

Moreover, the number of the subjects in each group was only 45 Therefore, this research should be considered as the pilot research first conducted on this issue in Vietnam

8 Delimitations

Because of the nature of this research and the research methods of data collection, findings and recommendations will be limited to the EFL teaching setting in Vietnam The particular composition of the sample of BLU students participating in this research may limit the generalizability of the results as well However, the findings and the recommendations from this research for pragmatic development of conversational

implicature may be beneficial to teachers in similar situations

9 Data Analysis

SPSS 12.0

test sessions of t

The structure of the report

The study will be reported in five chapters:

Chapter two

ITERATURE

This chapter reviews theoretical and empirical research relevant to the concept of

onversational implicature and the teachability of conversational implicature The

eview thus covers two main issues: conversational implicature and previous studies Conversational Implicature:

The notion of conversational implicature, according to Levinson (1983), is one of the ingle most important ideas in pragmatics; but unlike many other topics in pragmatics, it oes not have an extended history The American philosopher, Herbert Paul Grice, is onsidered as the father of this notion

1.1 Grice’s theory:

Levinson (1983) mentioned that in the W liam James lectures delivered at Harvard in

1967 Grice first introduced his theory about how people use language In this theory he developed the co-operative principle and the concept of conversational implicature

1.1.1 The co-operative principle:

Grice (1989) believed that all speakers regardless of their cultural background obey a

basic principle governing conversations which he termed ‘the cooperative principle’

According to him, speakers coopera hen making their contributions in

a conversation He

changes do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks,

s fixed from the start (e.g., by an initial proposal of a

excluded as conversationally unsuitable (Grice,

ed, at cepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in whi

ative as is required (for the current purposes of

question for discussion), or it may evolve during the exchange; it may be fairly definite, or it may be so indefinite as to leave very considerable latitude to the

participants (as in a casual conversation) But at each stage, some possible

conversational moves would be

1989: 26)

Grice (1989: 26-27) described his cooperative principle, which includes four principles or maxims, as the following:

sub-The cooperative principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is requir

the stage at which it occurs, by the ac

ch you are engaged

The maxims:

Quantity

1 Make your contribution as inform

the exchange)

2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

Quality Try to make your contribution one that is true

1 Do not say what you believe to be false

2 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

Relation Be relevant

Manner Be perspicuous

1 Avoid obscurity of expression

2 Avoid ambiguity

3 Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)

ade it short, in order to converse in a maximally

ted to A’s A wants to know where B is

quite clear B surely follows the maxim of manner

indicated that these maxims are not always followed

level The following example (Levinson, 1983: 102) should make this clear:

(2)

yellow VW outside Sue’s house

rative response and it completely follows the maxim of

is co-operative A may ask himself if there is cation of Bill and that of the car and arrive at the

W and there is a VW outside Sue’s house and that if that VW

nciple is not confined to

sfies A It is certain that he follows the maxim of quantity

Quality: B certainly follows this maxim because what h

Relation: B’s utterance is completely rela

ng and B gives the direct answer It is obvious that B follow

Manner: B’s answer is

However, Grice (1989) also

ctly or superficially but they are so

A: Where is Bill?

B: There is a

Literally, B’s utterance fails to answer A’s question because the location of Bill and that of the car are not related to each other, so it seems to violate the maxim of relation Therefore, B might be thought not to be co-operative However, at some deeper level B’s answer turns out to be a co-ope

relation Why is it so? On the assumption that B

any connection between the lo

suggestion that Bill has a V

is Bill’s, he may be in Sue’s house

Besides, Grice (1989) suggested that the co-operative pri

conversational exchanges but it is also applicable to all kinds of co-operative

because it actually derives from general considerations of rationality In order to make this clear he provided the following examples in terms of the co-operative principle

Quantity: If A is helping B to mend a car B expects A’s contributions to be

neit

s contributions to be genuine and not spurious If B needs

ake, he does not expect A to hand him

ake it clear what contribution A is making and to exe

.1.2

rative Principle; he may say, indicate, or allow it to become

her more nor less than is required If, for example, at a particular stage B needs four screws, B expects A to hand him the exact number A would fail to comply with this maxim if he knowingly gives B more or less than four

Quality: B expects A’

sugar as an ingredient in the cake A is assisting B to m

salt or any other ingredient A would fail to observe this maxim, if he gives B salt or any other ingredient

Relation: B expects A’s contributions to be appropriate to the immediate needs at

each stage of the transaction If B is mixing the ingredients for the cake, he does not expect to be handed a good book or even an oven cloth (though this might be an appropriate contribution at a later stage) A would fail to comply with this maxim if he does not give B the ingredients which B needs

1 He may quietly and unostentatiously violate a maxim; if so, in some

cases he will be liable to mislead

2 He may opt out from the operation both of the maxim and of the

Coopeplain that he is unwilling to cooperate in the way the maxim

requires He may say, for example, I cannot say more; my lips are sealed

3 He may be faced by a clash: He may be unable, for example, to

fulfill the first maxim of Quantity (Be as informative as is required)

axim’ (1 & ) and ‘openly flouting a maxim’ (3 & 4) The former means that the speaker does not

es not lead to conversational implicature while the latt

ed that it is the speakers that implicate and it is the hearers

that p has impl onversationally implicated that q, if:

hearer will rely

previous hea

without violating the second maxim of Quality (Have adequate evidence for what you say)

4 He may flout a maxim; that is He may blatantly fail to fulfill it

In Grice’s analysis, he made a clear distinction between ‘quietly violating a m

2

deliberately exploit a maxim and it do

er means the opposite and it leads to conversational implicature with the hearer’s assumption that the speaker has not really abandoned the cooperative principle

Grice (1989: 30-31) believ

ut a conversational implicature According to him a speaker who, by sa

icated that q, may be said to have c

The speaker is to be presumed to be observing the conversational maximperative Principle

must be supposed that the speaker is aware or think that q is require

in this presumption

work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2

er for a hearer to work out a conversational implicature Grice though

on the following facts:

The conventional meaning of the words used, together with the id

any references that may be involved

(2) The Cooperative Principle and its maxims

(3) The context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance

(4) Other items of background knowledge

(5) The fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under the

dings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to

be the case

to suppose that the speaker is not observing the

d The speaker knows (and knows that the hearer knows that he knows) that

hearer to think, or is at least willing to allow the

Consid

(3)

n might be explained as follows: B has apparently violated the maxim of rela

t response as apparent if, and only if, A supposes B to think that

B cannot come out that B cannot come; B intends A to think that B cann

maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle

c The speaker could not be doing this unless he thought that q

the hearer can see that the supposition that the speaker thinks that q is

required

e The speaker has done nothing to stop the hearer thinking that q

f The speaker intends the

hearer to think, that q

g So the speaker has implicated that q

er the following example (Yule, 1996: 43):

A: Hey, coming to the wild party tonight?

B: My parents are visiting

This situatio

tion with a change of topic, yet A has no reason to think that B is not cooperating; A can regard B’s irrelevan

; B knows that A can work

ot come, so B implicates that he cannot come

y, as Peccei (1999) made it short, in Grice’

is a result of the speaker’s flouting of a maxim combined with

that the speaker has not really abandoned the cooperative principle

les of conversational implicature:

up A: Examples in which no maxim is violated, or at least in which it is not maxim is violated Gric

out of petrol B: There is a garage round the corner

(5) A: Smith doesn’t seem to have a girlfriend these days

of visits to New York lately

eper level he flouts no maxim

m of quality because he does not know exactly where C

, a procedure by which a implicature by means of

examples of a

are informative at the level of what is implicated and they do not flout this

im this maxim is to be observed some informative inference

’s ability to explain the speaker’s selection

of this particular patent tautology

B: He has been paying a lot

In example (4) B’s utterance is relevant and the connection of between A’s and B’s utterance is clear because it is possible to buy petrol at a garage So, there is no maxim violated here B implicates that A can buy petrol at the garage round the corner The connection between A’s and B’s utterance in example (5) is not so clear B seems to infringe the maxim of relation superficially but in some de

not quite clear whether there is any maxim violated in this example

Group B: Examples in which a maxim is violated, but its violation is to be explained by the supposition of a clash with another maxim Grice gave an exa

not want to infringe the maxi

li France So, he implicates that he does

Group C: Examples that involve exploitation, that is

maxim is flouted for the purpose of getting in a conversational

something of the nature of a figure of speech

According to Grice in these examples some maxim is infringed at the level of what is said but it is observed at the level of what is implicated

Quantity

Utterances of patent tautologies, Grice believed, provide extreme

flouting of this maxim Such tautologies as “Women are women” and “War is war” are

totally non-informative and so violate the maxim of quantity at the level of what is said However, they

max On the assumption that

must be made and it is dependent on the hearer

Quality

Grice claimed that many figures of speech like irony, metaphor, meiosis, and hyperbole provide good examples of a violation of the maxim of quality

Irony Grice gave the following example:

X, with whom A has been on close terms until now, has betrayed a secret of A’s to a business rival A and his audience know this A says X is a fine friend In this example it

is clear to the audience that what A has said is untrue and the audience knows that A kno

the conclusion that A implicates

e opposite

You are the cream in my coffee is the example that Grice provided for this

figu

rance You are the cream in my coffee as an example

ker may intend the hearer to reach first the metaphor interpretant “You are my prid

to have broken

e intoxicated

ea party, A and B are talking to each other)

ws that this is completely obvious to the audience So, on the assumption that A is following the maxim of quality the audience comes to

th

Metaphor

re of speech The speaker of this utterance surely expresses a categorical falsehood

So, the speaker must intend to convey something rather different The most likely supposition Grice believes is that the speaker is attributing to his audience some feature

or features in respect of which the audience resembles (more or less fancifully) the mentioned substance The speaker may implicate “You are my pride and joy”

Grice thought that it is possible to find examples in which there is a combination of metaphor and irony Take the utte

The spea

e and joy” and then the irony one “You are my bane”

Meiosis Grice provided an example with no comment Of a man known

up all the furniture, one says He was a littl

Hyperbole Grice also gave one example without any comments Every nice girl loves a sailor

Relation

Examples in which this maxim is exploited are, as Grice noted, perhaps rare But he provided the following example:

(At a genteel t

(7) A: Mrs Kennedy is an old bag

B: The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn’t it?

B has blatantly refused to make what he says relevant to A’s remark He thereby may implicate that A’s remark should not be discussed B may fear that their discussion might

be overheard or Mrs Kennedy may be standing somewhere near them

Ma

nded closely with the score of

an (a) These two utterances are

g (b) instead of (a) the reviewer indicates that there was some striking difference

iss X’s performance and those to which the word singing is usually applied

The

Grice (1989) classified conversational implicature into two main kinds:

the following examples (Levinson, 1983: 126) to see the difference between thes

(8)

(9)

Whenever (8) is said there is always an implicature that the house is not the speaker’s

(9) appears in the following context:

nner

Among the examples that Grice provided the following is the most typical:

(a) Miss X sang “Home Sweet Horne”

(b) Miss X produced a series of sounds that correspo

“Home Sweet Horne”

Suppose that a reviewer has chosen (b) to utter rather th

nearly synonymous but (b) certainly violates the sub-maxim ‘be brief’ Therefore, by choosin

between M

reviewer, in this case, obviously indicates that Miss X’s performance suffered from

some hideous defect

1.2 Kinds of conversational implicature:

Generalized conversational implicatures: implicatures that ar

particular context or special scenario being necessary

• Particularized conversational implicatures: implicatures that require specific contexts

Consider

e two kinds of conversational implicature

I walked into a house yesterday

The dog is looking very happy

This implicature remains the same in any context in which this utterance appears So

there seems to be a generalized conversational implicature from the use of the expression

an F to the assumption that the mentioned F is not the speaker’s

In contrast, what is implicated when (9) is uttered is completely dependent on the context

in which it appears The implicature that perhaps the dog has eaten the roast beef can be worked out only when

A: Where is my roast beef?

This im

dist u

convers plicatures that are derived from the simple assumption that the speaker

asis of the speaker flouting or exploiting a his distinction, according to Levinson, underlies the cial class of utterances that are ‘figures of speech’ or

defined that a scalar

as:

many, most, all

metimes, often, usually, always

e all of the printer paper In (11)

B: The dog is looking very happy

plicature is thus a particularized conversational implicature

he account of Grice’s theory of conversational implica

ing ished between kinds of conversational implicature on another dimension: ational im

is observing the maxims (which he called Standard conversational implicature) and those

that are derived in more complex ways on the b

maxim (for which he had no name) T

common view that there is some spe

exploitations of more straightforward ways of talking Consider example (4) and example (7) above to see the difference between these two kinds

Gazdar (1979, as cited in Levinson 1983: 132-133) provided a subtype of generalized

conversational implicature called scalar implicature Gazdar

implicature is an implicature of the negative of any form higher on a scale when any form

in that scale is uttered He argued that a linguistic scale of values consists of a group of different words expressing different values of that scale such

Scale of quantity: few, some,

Scale of frequency: never, rarely, so

Scale of coldness: cool, cold, freezing

Scale of likelihood: possibly, probably, certainly

When a speaker has a scale of values at his disposal, he will select the word from the scale that is the most informative (maxim of quantity) and truthful (maxim of quality) The following examples (Peccei, 1999: 34) illustrate his argument:

(10) A: Who used all the printer paper?

B: I used some of it

(11) A: I hear you are always late with the rent

B: Well, sometimes I am

By choosing some in (10), B implicates that he did not us

B selects the word sometimes to implicate that he is not always late with the rent These

are examples of scalar implicature

Yule (1996) and Peccei (1999) completely agree on Grice’s classification of conversational implicature

1.3 Properties of conversational implicature:

nsider the following

plaining

implicature ‘His wife is not always

ample, when the expression ‘in fact always’ is added to

ouse in London

In

y bought a new house together, not one each’ Nevertheless,

in the context that Peter and Maria got div

am almost won the AFF cup

re ‘Vietnam did not quite win the AFF cup’ and this

versational implicatures are characterized b

Levinson, 1983) The first property is cancellability or

sational implicatures can simply disappear in certain lingu

contexts Specifically, a conversational implicature may be cancelled either by adding some information that indicates that the speaker has opted out or by the context of utterance that makes it clear that the speaker is opting out First, a conversational implicature can be canceled by adding further information Co

example:

(13) His wife is often com

This utterance certainly leads to the scalar

complaining’ However, for ex

(13), this implicature will disappear Next, an implicature can also be contextually canceled Take the following example into consideration:

(14) Peter and Maria bought a new h

the context that Peter and Maria are a newly-married couple, this utterance can indicate the implicature ‘the

this implicature will evaporate if (14) is spoken

orced

The second property of implicatures is non-detachability Conversational

implicatures are attached to the semantic content of what is said, not to linguistic form (except for those due to the maxim of manner) Therefore, a conversational implicature cannot be detached from an utterance simply by replacing the words of the utterance with their synonyms In other words, any linguistic form with the same semantic content tends

to carry the same conversational implicature For example:

(15) Vietn

This utterance carries the implicatu

implicature still remains the same even if the word almost is replaced by any of its synonyms such as nearly

The third property is calculability That is to say, conversational implicatures

can be derived only via the co-operative principle and its maxims

co-lexical items Some of these words are but, and, therefore, moreover (Grice,

on, 1983: Consider the

nest

(19

The fourth property, non-conventionality, means

implicatures, though dependent on the literal meaning of an utterance, are not part of that meaning

And the fifth property of conversational implicatures is indeterminacy An

utterance w

erent occasions In fact, it is probably impossible to determine on any one occasion the set of associated implicatures Levinson (1983: 118) provided the following example: (16) John is a machine

This could mean that John is cold, or efficient, or hard working, or puffs and blows, or has little in the way of grey matter, or indeed any and all of these

Finally, universality means that conversational impli

Levinson (1983) argued that “if the max

cooperation, we would expect them to be universal in application, at least in cooperative kinds of interaction.” (p 121)

1.4 Conversational implic

Besides conversational implicature Grice (1989) envisaged a completely d

kind of implicature, namely conventional implicature He defi

licatures are non-truth-conditional inferences that are not derived

operative principle or the maxims but arise due to the conventional features attached to particular

1989), even (Kemption, 1975; Karttunen and Peters, 1979, as cited in Levins

127) and Wilson (1975, as cited in Levinson, 1983: 127) added yet

following examples:

(17) p but q (+> p is in contrast to q)

John is poor but he is ho

(18) p therefore q (+> q follows from p)

He is a Vietnamese; he therefore knows how to use chopsticks

) Even p (+> contrary to expectation)

He even helped tidy up afterwards

(20) p moreover q (+> q is in addition to p)

Mary can read Vietnamese Moreover, she can write short stories in the language

being poor and being hon

, oh, so, sir, madam, mate, your honour, sonny, hey, oi

icatures are completely in contrast to those of scussed above (Grice, 1989; Levinson, 1983: 127-128)

s are non-cancelable, that is, they cannot be

about the nature of the catures are cancelable Second, conventional

e they depend on the particular linguistic items used

are non-detachable because they are attached

ey are

es are non-conventional because they are

not to be uni

2 Previous studies:

In (17) there is a conventional implicature of contrast between

est In (18) the conventional implicature arising is that being Vietnamese results in knowing how to use chopsticks The conventional implicature in (19) is that it is a

surprise that he helped to tidy up afterwards In (20) the use of moreover brings in the

conventional implicature that the fact that she can write short stories in Vietnamese is additional to the fact that she can read Vietnamese

A very large number of deictic expressions seem to have conventional implicatures (Levinson, 1983: 128) such as: however, moreover, besides, anyway, well, still, furthermore, although

Properties of conventional impl

conversational implicatures di

First of all, conventional implicature

defeated because they do not rely on defeasible assumptions

context By contrast, conversational impli

implicatures are detachable becaus

By comparison, conversational implicatures

to the semantic content, but not to the linguistic form of what is said Third, th

non-calculable because they are not calculated via pragmatic principles and contextual

knowledge, but rather given by convention By contrast, conversational implicatures are calculable using pragmatic principles, contextual knowledge and background

assumptions Fourth, conventional implicatures are conventional because they are

attached by convention to particular lexical items They are therefore an arbitrary part of meaning By comparison, conversational implicatur

derived from the co-operative principle and its maxims Therefore, they are motivated

rather than arbitrary Fifth, they have a relatively determinate content or meaning while

conversational implicatures do not Finally, conventional implicatures tend

versal By contrast, conversational implicatures tend to be universal

There were few studies regarding the education of conversational implicature To the knowledge of the researcher, Bouton and Kobuta are especially typical among the very few authors studying the education of conversational implicature

2.1 Bouton’s studies:

Bouton (1988, as cited in Kobuta 1995: 38-39) made a cross-cultural study of the ability of non-native English speaking university students in the USA to interpret implicatures in English and found that they arrived at the same interpretation of implicatures as the American native speakers only about 79% of the time

Bouton (1994, as cited in Kobuta 1995: 38-39) made a longitudinal study to examine two groups of international students at an American university with regard to their ability

to interpret implicature when it was not deliberately taught He studied two groups of subjects The first group of 30 subjects took part in the multiple choice implicature test of

20 items in the four-and-a-half-year study (in 1986 and in 1991) There was no significant difference in the scores on the 20 items of the implicature test in 1991 between the American native speakers and the non-native-speaker subjects (p>.3056) but there was an important difference in 1986 (p<.0001) It was thus clear that the scope of the difference between the native speakers and the non-native speakers disappeared after

r subjects had resided in the U.S.A for four years It was also found that

e-speaker subjects was given a modified version of the

the spe

non-native-the non-native-speake

the number of the items which were interpreted differently was greatly reduced and none of the types of implicature which were troublesome for the non-native speakers in

1986 were consistently causing trouble in 1991

The second group of 34 non-nativ

implicature test in the 17-month study (in 1990 and in 1992) It was found that the subjects responded significantly better in 1992 than in 1990 (p<.0001) Nevertheless, a comparison of the scores of the non-native speakers and the native speakers showed a significant difference (p<.019) As a result, it came to the conclusion that

aker subjects improved their proficiencies in the interpretation of implicature, although they were not yet native-like What was the most important was that they did not master any of the types of implicature which bothered them initially 17 months before Comparing the results of these two groups, Bouton (1994) concluded that the process of learning conversational implicature is slow when it is not deliberately taught

From Bouton’s conclusion arises the question: How long would it take EFL learners

to learn conversational implicature without deliberate education in an EFL context like Vietnam? Perhaps the answer is that it would take them a very long time (definitely more than four years) So, the class instruction of conversational implicature is significantly necessary for EFL learners especially for English non-majored students

2.2 Kobuta’s study:

Unlike Bouton’s study in an ESL learning environment, Kobuta (1995) conducted a study dealing with the teachability of conversational implicature to Japanese EFL lear

imm

est, and they had ores in the guessing of items on the first post-test than the pre-test Fro

ners And Kobuta concluded that it is effective to teach conversational implicature to EFL learners in Japan Kobuta studied 126 Japanese EFL university students who were reported to have studied English for six or seven years in only instructional settings The subjects were divided into three groups each of which consisted of 42 students The three groups were given a multiple choice test of six items and a sentence-combining test of ten items In one experimental group, the explanations of the rules were given by a teacher

In the other experimental group, consciousness-raising tasks evolved from group discussion The treatment was provided to each experimental group collectively in Japanese and lasted about twenty minutes The third group was a control group All of the subjects were given a pre-test and two post-tests The post-test one was givenediately after treatment while the second post-test was given one month later

The results obtained in this study showed that experimental groups generated significantly better responses In addition, no subjects extracted the expected pragmatic generalizations from the treatment that they were applying to the new items Also, the conscious-raising group performed better in the post-test than in the pre-t

significantly higher sc

m these results, Kobuta concluded that teaching conversational implicature through both explicit explanations of rules and consciousness-raising tasks is highly facilitative, amount of time and exposure to the pragmatic system may be a crucial factor to induction, and it may be advantageous for learners to process language on their own through consciousness-raising tasks

What Kobuta found is very encouraging However, there were some weak points in Kobuta’s study in my opinion Firstly, the treatment time which was only 20 minutes in

Kobuta’s study was too short This may account for the result that no subjects extracted the expected pragmatic generalizations from the treatment that they were applying to the new items Secondly, Kobuta covered too many types of conversational implicature (nine types) at a time in a one-short treatment of 20 minutes but Kobuta provided only one item for each type This may also account for the result that no subjects extracted the expected pragmatic generalizations from the treatment that they were applying to the new items Fin

ature Then the chapter made a distinction between con

ally, Kobuta’s study focused only on implicature comprehension Implicature production is very crucial as well

Again, through Kobuta’s study the class instruction of conversational implicature is significantly necessary for EFL learners especially for English non-majored students

Summary

This chapter has discussed theoretical and empirical literature crucial to the understanding of the concept of English conversational implicature and the education of this concept Firstly, the chapter covered the concept of co-operative principles, the concept of conversational implicature, the classification of conversational implicature and the properties of conversational implic

versational implicature and conventional implicature Finally, this chapter mentioned Bouton’s studies on ESL learners’ability to interpret conversational implicature without deliberate instruction in the USA and Kobuta’s study dealing with the teachability of conversational implicature to EFL learners in Japan

Chapter three METHODOLOGY

1 Methodological issues

The majority of the interventional studies of instructed pragmatic learning followed a pretest/posttest design Very few studies included a delayed posttest (Lyster, 1994; Kobuta, 1995; Morrow, 1996; Pearson, 1998; Liddicoat & Crozet, 2001) Only two studies followed a posttest design (Tateyama et al., 1997; Fukuya & Clark, 2001) House (1996) and Yoshimi (2001) included an intermittent test Kasper (2001) pointed out that the exclusion of delayed posttest may not be the result of an oversight on the part of the researcher but a consequence of institutio l constraints in the research setting The intermittent test, according to Kasper, has the advantage of providing feedback to the researcher that may be used to adjust the tre xtends over the entire course

in later phases of the course

Some studies included a control group (W 84, 1986; Billmyer, 1990; Lyster, 1994; Bouton, 1994a; Kobuta, 1995; Fukuya et al., 1998; Fukuya & Clark, 2001; Rose & Ng, 2001; Yoshimi, 2001; Edwards & Csiceùr, 2004) The rational for a control group, as Kasper (2001) showed, archer to assess if posttreatment effects observed in the experim result of the treatment

The empirical evidence showed that a c nceptual and methodological key issue of these studies was the effect of explicit and im atic learning The

vestigated explicit instruction while very few studies included im

naatment which eildner-Bassett, 19

is to allow the reseental group(s) are in fact the

oplicit instruction on pragmmajority of these studies in

plicit instruction (House & Kasper, 1981; House, 1996; Tateyama et al., 1997; Pearson, 1998) The evidence also indicated that explicit teaching of pragmatics is more effective than implicit teaching while there is no guarantee that explicit instruction proves universally more effective, according to Kasper (2001)

The treatment length in the interventional studies of instructed pragmatic learning varied from long-time treatment to short-time treatment As Kasper (2001) pointed out, the treatment could be an entire 14-week semester (House & Kasper, 1981b; House, 1996) or a five-day intensive course of 40 hours (Wilder-Bassett, 1984, 1986) and a 12-

hour distribution over five weeks (Lyster, 1994); it could be a one-short treatment of 25 minutes (Tateyama et al., 1997) or a 20 minutes (Kubota, 1995) Short treatments may pro

00 were first year students

e subjects had finished the first textbook-English Kn

an experimental study with a pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test co

majors These students had finished their first year English courses (first semester course

ve effective (Tateyama et al., 1997) but they can also be quite ineffective (Kubota, 1995) for some instructional targets

This research takes the methodological issues in the previous paragraphs into consideration

2 Study setting

This study was conducted in BLU during the second semester of the school year

2007-2008 (from May to September, 2007-2008) BLU is a very young one It was established in November, 2006 on the basis of combining the former Teacher Training College of Bac Lieu and the former Bac Lieu Center for Continuing Education BLU has five faculties They are the Faculty of Agriculture, the Faculty of Law and Economics, the Faculty of Computer science, and the Faculty of Education The total number of students in the school year of 2007-2008 was over one thousand Over 7

The researcher is a teacher of English belonging to the Department of English in the Faculty of Education in BLU The researcher had been teaching English for nearly 14 years at the former Bac Lieu Center for Continuing Education before the establishment of BLU Therefore, the researcher has been teaching English for approximately 15 years The text books used in BLU are Know-how series: book I, book II and book III (written by Therese Naber and Angela Blackwell, published in 2004 by Oxford University Press) They are used for first year students, second year students and third year students, respectively All of th

ow-how (book I) before they took part in this research

3 Study design

This study was

ntrol group design

3.1 Subjects

A total of 90 Vietnamese English non-majored university students from two classes in BLU participated in this study These two classes were randomly selected among the first year classes in BLU One class were agriculture majors and the other were economics