Exploring Taiwanese EFL College Students’ Listening Comprehension of Conversational Implicature

[[abstract]]Despite increasing interest in Interlanguage Pragmatics ILP) research, much of the work in ILP, to date, has been limited to L2 learners’ production of speech acts. Research on the comprehension of pragmatic function, however, has been scarce, particularly in the area of conversational implicature. Although conversational implicature as a conversational strategy is well known, it is not clear whether it is a useful conversational strategy for EFL learners. Therefore, this study attempts to explore the extent to which EFL learners can comprehend conversational implicature from the context in terms of accuracy of comprehension, inferential strategy use, and potential difficulties during comprehension process. Fifty-eight Taiwanese college students, ranging in proficiency from low-intermediate to advanced level, completed a 21-item computerized implicature listening test, measuring their comprehension of seven types of conversational implicature. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were also conducted to elicit learners’ inferential strategy use and their comprehension difficulties. Regression analyses revealed a positive L2 proficiency effect on learners’ implicature comprehension. Among the seven types of conversational implicature, learners comprehended significantly differently in six types of conversational implicature. Learners with different proficiency levels were observed to demonstrate different preferences for strategy use: High-proficiency learners were found to employ more top-down strategies, whereas low-proficiency learners relied more on bottom-up strategies. During comprehension process, both high-proficiency and low proficiency learners shared similar comprehension difficulties: Learners reported that their difficulties existed in less relevant implicature type, habitual use of literal interpretation and their assumptions. Low-proficiency learners reported that their difficulties mainly arouse from inadequate language proficiency, failure to recognize speaker intention and specific types of Formulaic-based implicature. To conclude, this study is important in laying the groundwork for understanding the nature of EFL learners’ comprehension process of conversational implicature and providing implications for acquisition and instruction on conversational implicature.