Application of Conversational Implicatures in Teaching English Audio-visual Course
理論研究
作者：劉慧瑩
【Abstract】English audio-visual course is one of the main courses for the English learners. Many teachers have so much to improve students’ listening. But the effect has been unsatisfactory. What they often ignore is in actual oral communication people do not always express themselves directly but tend to say something with implied meanings. As a result， students often fail to understand what the speaker indicates if they only focus on the literal meaning of utterance. This paper attempts to use the conversational implication， to solve this problem in the teaching. Many points hard to understand in a certain conversation can be explained by the conversational implication theory. Therefore， the introduction to the basic knowledge of the conversational implicatures（CI） theory is strongly recommended to improve the students’ listening conversation comprehension.
【Key words】English audio-visual course； conversational implication； conversation comprehension
1 Introduction
Although much attention has been devoted to English audio-visual course， the teaching effect has been unsatisfactory. What has led to a central question in research is how to improve students’ listening comprehension by watching English movies. That’s just the case in English audio-visual course： however good one’s listening skill may be， he can never make thorough comprehension if he gets the literal meaning.
2 Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicatures
2.1 What is Cooperative Principle?
Grice believes there must be some mechanisms governing the production and comprehension of these utterances and that a set of assumptions guides the conduct of conversation. This is what he calls the Cooperative Principle： the maxim of quantity，the maxim of quality，the maxim of relation，the maxim of manner
2.2 What is Conversational Implicature?
Conversational implicature is something meant，implied，or suggested distinct from what’s said. This notion is one of the most important ideas in pragmatics. It’s a meaning in pragmatics different from the “meaning” in semantics which is the literal meaning. When the two meanings are different， conversational implicatures are made. For example：
（1）Doctor： I need to give you an anesthesia
Teddy： Do I look really that stupid?
Doctor： I cannot do an operation like this without an anesthesia
（from Prison Break）
Literally Teddy’s answer did not show any sign of rejection or acceptance of an anesthesia. His reply seems unrelated to the doctor’s words. But after a careful analysis， we can easily find he actually refused the doctor. His answer is an indirect way of refusal with stronger force. Conversations like this frequently appear in the movies. If teachers don’t explain this to students， they may fail to understand them