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 NGUYỄN ÁI HOÀNG CHÂU Supervisor: NGUYỄN HOÀNG TUẤN, Ph. 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 non- majors in English at Bac Lieu University for their valuable support and cooperation in helping me to carry out the survey questionnaire. Especially, I 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. The subjects extracted some types of conversational implicature more easily than the others.
And they scored higher for some types than for the others. 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.
Types of conversational implicature should be selected suitable for the proficiency level of the students in teaching pragmatic knowledge. 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. 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 …………………………………………………….
Purpose of the study ………………………………………………………… 6 3. Significance of the study. Definitions of terms. The structure of the report .…………………………………………………10 Chapter Two: Review of the Literature 1.1 The cooperative principle ………………………………….3 Examples of Conversational Implicature ………………….2 Kinds of Conversational Implicature………………………………….3 Properties of Conversational Implicature.4 Conversational Implicature vs.
28 Chapter Three: Methodology 1.3 Procedures of data collection ….4 Data analysis ………………………………………………………… 43 Chapter Four: Results and Discussion 1.2 Test B ………………………………………………………………… 67 Chapter Five: Conclusions and recommendations 1. 78 Appendixes Appendix A: Tests ………………………. 84 Appendix C: Questionnaire for students ………………………………. 96 Appendix D: Questionnaire for teachers ……………………………….
102 LIST OF TABLES Table 1. MCT scores in groups and sessions …………………………. Means and standard deviations by groups and sessions in the MCT …. Results of the T-test for the MCT between the two groups ……… 49 Table 4.
Means and standard deviations of the control group in MCT sessions …………………………………………………………… 50 Table 5. Results of the T-test for the MCT sessions in the control group…. Means and standard deviations of the experimental group in MCT sessions ……………………………………………………. Results of the T-test for the MCT sessions in the experimental group ………………………………………………………………… 52 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 ……………………………………………. SWT scores in groups and sessions ……………. Means and standard deviations by groups and sessions in the SWT ………………………………………………………….
Results of the T-test for the SWT between the two groups ……… 60 Table 13. Means and standard deviations of the control group in SWT sessions. Results of the T-test for the SWT sessions in the control group ……. Means and standard deviations of the experimental group in SWT sessions ……………………………………………….
Results of the T-test for the SWT sessions in the experimental group ………………………………………………………………. 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 ……………………………………………………. Comparison of mean scores among MCT sessions in the control group…………………………………………………. Comparison of mean scores among MCT sessions in the experimental group …………………………………………. Comparison of mean scores between two groups in SWT sessions …………………………………………………….
Comparison of mean scores among SWT sessions in the control group…………………………………………………. 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 150th member 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. 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.