Pragmatic awareness of conversational implicatures and the usefulness of explicit instruction

Abstract

The present study attempts to investigate the degree of pragmatic awareness of learners of English as a foreing language and also whether explicit instruction facilitates the learners’ interpretation of these implicatures. For this purpose, twenty-six students were assigned to an experimental and control group and their performance was measured through a written multiplechoice test before and after the treatment. The analysis of the data indicated that most students in both groups proved to be rather insensitive to implicatures before instruction. However, after being exposed to explicit teaching, the students in the experimental group exhibited a significant improvement in their recovery of implicatures.