Abstract：English teaching is playing a more and more important role in the fields of modern education, especially at college. For many college students, listening is the most difficult course to learn well while listening does play a critical role in English teaching. Thus, it is crucial to master the skills for English listening. As we know, most of listening materials are presented in the form of conversation, as it were , conversation is the best carrier of English listening contents. So in this paper, the author tries to analyze how to teach English listening from the perspective of conversational implicature. In many situations，people tend to make use of conversational implicature in conversations for different purposes．Therefore, to apply such a theory to college English listening teaching is very useful in elevating students’ ability of analyzing conversations, which is beneficial to improving their listening comprehension.

Keywords: college English listening teaching；conversation; conversational implicature

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-2

3. Theories related to conversational implicature-3

3.1 Grice’s theory of implicature-3

3.2 Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation-3

3.3 Violation of the Maxims-4

4. The Application of Conversational Implicature in College English Listening Teaching.-6

4.1 The Traditional Way of Listening Teaching in College English-6

4.2 An Analysis of the Listening Materials in College English-7

4.3 Applying Conversational Implicature to College English Listening Teaching-7

4.4 Some other suggestions for listening-11

5. Conclusion-12

Works Cited-14