우리나라 대학생들의 영어 대화 함의 해석 능력

Korean university students' ability to interpret English conversational implicatures

Conversational implicature is a means of indirect communication. Many times the literal meaning of what someone says does not match with the intended meaning of the speaker. In this case, the listener has to search for another possible meaning that is derived from the given context. Messages that are understood through this inferential process are called implicatures(Grice, 1975). Conversational implicature is, in fact, a common and frequently used strategy in communication. However, coming from different cultural background, EFL learners often experience difficulty understanding implicature due to lack of exposure to and explicit instruction of it. This study specifically investigates Korean university students' ability to interpret English conversational implicatures. Given the situational descriptions and dialogues, the participants were asked to indicate their level of confidence on the 5-point Likert scale. They wetr then asked to write down their own interpretation of implicatures asked. The results showed that the participants misunderstood the implicatures 30% of the time, and they especially showed a great difficulty understanding the 'understated criticism,' one of the categories of implicatures. The analysis also illustrated that the confidence level and the accuracy in interpreting English implicatures did not always coincide with each other. The results are expected to provide useful pedagogical suggestions to English teachers and text developers.