Implicature and Applying the concept to teach listening and speaking skills Implicature and Applying the concept to teach listening and speaking skills Author Tran Thi Thu Trang (18 10 86), student of English M A course 18th, class C, in the Department of Postgraduate Studies, College of Foreign Languages at Vietnam National University Abstract Implicature is a common linguistic phenomenon which occurs in all languages In English teaching classroom context, students may experience some difficult.
Implicature and Applying the concept to teach listening and speaking skills Author Tran Thi Thu Trang (18.10.86), student of English M.A course 18 th, class C, in the Department of Postgraduate Studies, College of Foreign Languages at Vietnam National University Abstract Implicature is a common linguistic phenomenon which occurs in all languages In English teaching classroom context, students may experience some difficulties in interpretation of implicature in listening comprehension exercises or speaking practice In general, if the conversation is simple and direct, students can know exactly what is being said through the literal meaning In fact, however, there are conversations in which the speakers say one thing and mean another And we call this phenomenon implicature This article first examines Grice's Cooperative principle and Maxims of conversation as well as types of implicature and then suggests some listening and speaking techniques and activities applying the concept "Implicature" in teaching listening and speaking skills Keywords Cooperative principle, maxims of conversation, implicature, applying the concept "Implicature" to teach listening and speaking skills Introduction Students today are demanded with full competence of English Understand what is being said and communicate successfully are core requirements for most students In the context of English listening and speaking classrooms, it is important for teachers to develop students' competence to understand the real meaning of what is being said when exposed to a short conversation and then they can take further action- to make a choice, filling the blanks, or answer the questions More importantly, this can assist students to improve the speaking skill In conversation we usually understand what is said directly and straightforwardly That is we base on the original or literal meaning of the words But there are cases that seem the conversation is expressed indirectly, so students cannot make the right judgment if they only consider its literal meaning The two following examples will illustrate the point: Exchange 1: Jack: Did you enjoy Animal farm? Lyly: No, I don't Exchange 2: Jack: Did you enjoy Animal farm? Lyly: I only like detective stories In the exchange 1, Lyly gives the direct and relevant answer to Jack's question, and the listener is easy to infer the meaning : They are talking about a story and Lyly does not like it In the case of the exchange 2, the two speakers are also talking about the story but Lyly does not give the direct answer to Jack's question instead by suggesting another topic It seems quite irrelevant in the surface structure level as far as the question- answer is concerned If we believe that the two people in the conversation are cooperative and that their conversation is meaningful, we would assume that the answer must be relevant to the question and we need interpret more than the literal meaning of the sentence by applying the other way round Here Jack puts what Lyly has said together with other piece of information he has and he comes up with a new piece of information The process is: What Lyly said: Lyly only likes detective stories Jack know that: Animal farm is not a detective story Therefore: Lyly does not like Animal farm So for the listeners in listening comprehension as well as speaking classroom, it is most important that they should be aware the two speakers in a conversation is observing one common principle—the Cooperative Principle (CP), which generates the meaning of the whole conversation: sometimes obvious and direct; sometimes implied and expressed in a round-about way- It is called implicature We find that implicature is a common phenomenon in daily conversations Most students have difficulties in indentifying conversational implicatures However, implicature is not officially mentioned as a techniques in teaching English, specifically, in teaching listening and speaking skills Cooperative principle and Maxims of conversation Grice's first insight was that there might be some general principles behind how hearers retrieve implicatures This basis idea was this: communication is a cooperative activity, so when two people are communicating, it is in both their interests to make the communication go as smoothly as possible in order to achieve their mutual aim But what counts as being cooperative? Grice's answer to this question is that speakers follow a general cooperative principle It is defined as follow: " Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged" This implies that you need not and should not supply information which you can assume that your audience already has- just as suggested by the principles of necessity and sufficiency The Cooperative principle can be broken down into a number of different maxims of conversation, which fall into four basis categories: Maxims of quantity ("say just as much as is necessary"): Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange Do not make the contribution more informative than is required This maxim means that the speaker/writer has to include all the information that the addressee requires to understand If the speaker leaves out a crucial piece of information, the addressee will not understand what the speaker is trying to say But it is not necessary for the speaker/writer to provide the information that is not necessary or required Example on the maxim of quantity: Mum: Did you finish your homework? Pat: I finished my algebra Mum: Well, get busy and finish your English, too! The child did not say that her English homework is not done, nor did she imply it Nevertheless her mother is entitled to draw this conclusion, based on the combination of what the child actually said and the cooperative principle Maxims of quality ("tell the truth"): Do not say what you believe to be false Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence Example on maxims of quality: A: Should I buy my son this new sports car? B: I don’t know if that’s such a good idea His record isn’t so great B’s answer is truthful and it is supported by evidence Maxims of relation ("stick to the point") Be relevant Relevance is an extremely important principle in linguistics In the context of Grice's Co-operative principle, the demand for relevance simply means that the speaker/writer should only include information in his communication that is relevant to the discourse topic It is interesting to observe that the perceptions of what is relevant and what is irrelevant diverges among people This shows that relevance is a matter of degree, not something absolute In linguistics that is quite typical Hardly anything is set in stone, almost everything is a matter of degree or statistical frequency This is also a problem with Gricean approach What exactly is relevance? What makes one contribution relevant and another not? Grice himself was acutely aware of this vagueness in what it is to be relevant but never him came up with a precise formulation Example on maxims of relation: A: How are you doing in school? B: Not too well, actually I'm failing two of my classes B’s answer is relevant Maxims of manner ("be clear") Avoid obscurity Avoid ambiguity Be brief Be orderly Example on maxims of manner: - John got into Columbia and won a scholarship “and” means that both linked events occurred, but implicates also temporal progression due to the maxim of manner: be orderly Classification of implicature In the above we have had a full discussion about Grice’s Cooperative principle and the its maxims We see that in any kind of conversation it’s usually the case that both the speaker and the listener will observe the Cooperative principle However these maxims are not always fulfilled A speaker may quietly violate a maxim, he may be faced with a clash between different maxims, or he may flout a maxim in such a way that the listener can be assumed to understand that this is being done The latter case is especially interesting since it gives rise to a "conversational implicature" that is at variance with the literal meaning of the utterance In such a case, the speaker is said to "exploit" a maxim Implicatures: A special case of situations in which the perceived meaning extends beyond the literal meaning "It is clear that implicature plays a major role in language change, triggering both syntactic and semantic changes Indeed it seems to be one of the single most important mechanisms whereby matters of language usage feed back into and affect matters of language structure [Levinson, p 166] According to Grice and Yule (1998), implicatures are classified into two main types: Conventional implicatures which is additional unstated meaning associated with the use of specific words such as but, and, therefore, even, yet, or Therefore, we can draw out that conventional implicatures are not based on cooperative principle or maxims and independent from the context for their interpretation For instance, George is short but brave (contrast) Sue and Bill are divorced (conjunction) He jumped on his horse and rode away (sequence) I dropped the camera and it broke (consequence) Conversational implicatures which are inferred via the cooperative principle or maxims Example: A: I am out of petrol B: There is a garage around the corner Grice also distinguishes conversational implicatures that depend heavily on context or occasion ("particularized conversational implicatures") from those that not ("generalized conversational implicatures") According to Yule (1998) the former are inferences which are required to work out the conveyed meaning…when our conversations take place in very specific contexts in which locally recognized inferences are assumed The latter, no special knowledge is required in the context to calculate the additional conveyed meaning The two following examples can be seen as illustration: Exchange 1: Doobie: Did you invite Bella and Cathy? Mary: I invited Bella So Mary means that she did not invite Bella generalized conversational implicature Exchange 2: Rick: Hey, coming to the wild party tonight? Tom: My parents are visiting Tom implies that he cannot come particularized conversational implicature Classification of conversations that involve in implicature in listening comprehension We have talked about the Cooperative principle and maxims in the above section In listening comprehension (either in examinations or in the classroom), students somehow are having difficulties in interpreting the conversational implicatures from the dialogue they hear The same situation also occurs in speaking classroom Imagine that you were in a conversation with others and you would not understand what they mean, then the conversation would be failed In English listening comprehension, as far as the conversation are involved, they fall into several categories: The first one are those that observe the cooperative principle very strictly and are easy to infer the meaning For example, A: I'd like to buy some fruit B: Which fruit you want? In this example both the speakers are very cooperative and the answer to the question is relevant and informative enough to provide the sufficient information that the first speaker needs To these kinds of conversation it is not a difficult task for the both the students and the teacher The second one are those through the flouting of CP maxim(s) there evokes the conversational implicature that listeners should try hard to interpret The types of conversation that need to be interpreted to figure out the implicature includes (Laurence F.B, 1999): Relevance A: How about going for a walk? B: Isn’t it raining out? Indirect criticism: The Indirect Criticism implicature often follows a request for an evaluation of something When expressed using this implicature, the evaluation is negative That effect is achieved by praising some unimportant feature of the item being evaluated, thus implying that there is nothing more flattering that can be said For example, A: Have you seen Robin Hood? B: Yeah I went last night A: What did you think of it? B: The cinematography was great A: Oh, that bad, hug? Sequence-based implicature Sequence-based implicatures are based on the assumption that unless there are indications to the contrary, events being described occur in the order in which they are expressed The effect of this assumption is easily seen in the difference in the sequence of events implied by sentences such as : Jack drove to Chicago and had dinner Jack had dinner and drove to Chicago Irony: For example: Context: Bill and Peter work together in the same office They sometimes are sent on business trips together and are becoming good friends They often have lunch together and Peter has even invited Bill to have dinner with him and his wife at their home several times Now Peter’s friends have told him that they that they saw Bill out dancing with Peter’s wife recently while Peter was out of town on a business trip On hearing this, Peter’s comment was… Peter: Bill knows how to be a really good friend, doesn’t he? Applying the concept "Implicature" to teach listening and speaking skills In English classroom, the importance of interpreting the conversational implicature is obvious For the teacher, his/her major task should not be just finish the class by letting the students listen to the materials again and again and then provide the correct answers to the questions Instead the toughest part of the job is that how to support the students in the process of listening and speaking, and how to develop the competence of implicature interpretation in English classroom This part presents some listening and speaking techniques and activities with the hope that they can assist students in interpretation of implicature First of all, teachers should explain what implicature is, try to make explanation simple enough and avoid using linguistic terms For teaching listening comprehension, teachers should Choose authentic material: Authenticity should be evident both in language and in task The language should reflect real discourse, including hesitations, rephrasing, and a variety of accents Use of authentic material, such as workplace training videos, audio tapes of actual workplace exchanges, and TV and radio broadcasts, increases transferability to listening outside of the ESL classroom context to work and to community Prepare learners psychologically for the listening activity, telling them that they will not be able to understand everything they hear, and that they should not panic because of this Engage the learners in pre-listening activity: This activity should establish the purpose of the listening activity and activate the schemata by encouraging the learners to think about and discuss what they already know about the content of the listening text This activity can also provide the background needed for them to understand the text, and it can focus attention on what to listen for For teaching speaking skill, teacher should create teaching activities for all kinds of implicatures from easy (generalized) to difficult (particularized) These activities can be conducted these in class or some can be given as homework if the time is limited Here are some speaking activities applying the concept "Implicature" Activity 1: Ask a student to tell the class a short funny story, or, especially, a short funny conversation Then, ask students to analyze the reason why it is funny Activity 2: Ask some pairs of students to compose a short conversation which will make the class laugh The class will vote which is the best Students have to rehearse the conversation very naturally, including raising or lowering their voice This activity will help students to speak English more naturally Activity 3: Ask two students to compose a short conversation in which the answer is not allowed to be direct from the question Then, another student is asked to guess what the answer implies Activity 4: Let students read a humor story which violates one of the four maxims; then ask the students why the story cause humor Activity 5: Ask students to listen to some short conversations in which participants imply something behind the language used Then, ask students what participants in each conversation means Conclusion According to Grice, conversational implicature plays an important role in our personal interactions This article reviews the theory which explains how we correctly interpret what others are implying in conversations, that is Cooperative principle and maxims of conversation The concept "Implicature" and its types are also stated quite clearly Although the role of implicature in communication is undeniable, it is not paid appropriate attention in teaching listening and speaking skills to EFL students Therefore, this article mentions the classification of conversations that involve implicature in listening comprehension and suggests some listening and speaking techniques and activities that would be helpful in English classroom context It is hoped that these will make the lessons more interesting and students can improve their listening and speaking skills References Anderson, A & Lynch T.,1980, Listening Cambridge University Press Mustafa Shazali Mustafa, The Interpretation of Implicature: A Comparative Study between Implicature in Linguistics and Journalism Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol 1, No 1, pp 35-43, January 2010,© 2010 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland Levinson, S C., 1995, Pragmatics Cambridge University Press, United States Lewis, Marilyn 2003, Study skills for speakers of English as second language, Basingstoke Yule, G., 1998, Pragmatics Oxford University Press, London ... listen to the materials again and again and then provide the correct answers to the questions Instead the toughest part of the job is that how to support the students in the process of listening and. .. for the both the students and the teacher The second one are those through the flouting of CP maxim(s) there evokes the conversational implicature that listeners should try hard to interpret The. .. like detective stories In the exchange 1, Lyly gives the direct and relevant answer to Jack's question, and the listener is easy to infer the meaning : They are talking about a story and Lyly does