Testing conversational implicature in the TOEIC examination.

  1. Martínez Celis, Andrea 1
  2. Maíz Arévalo, Carmen 1
  1. 1 Universidad Complutense de Madrid
    info

    Universidad Complutense de Madrid

    Madrid, España

    ROR 02p0gd045

Revista:
El Guiniguada

ISSN: 0213-0610 2386-3374

Any de publicació: 2022

Títol de l'exemplar: El Guiniguada

Número: 31

Pàgines: 91-100

Tipus: Article

DOI: 10.20420/ELGUINIGUADA.2022.508 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAccés obert editor

Altres publicacions en: El Guiniguada

Resum

The incorrect inference of conversational implicature might often lead to communicative breakdown among interlocutors who share the same L1, and it may certainly entail an extra degree of effort on the part of L2 language learners. For this reason, it should be tackled in L2 courses so that students are prepared to engage successfully in realistic communication. However, teaching learners to infer pragmatic meaning correctly when faced with conversational implicature raises the question of how to test whether these learners have managed to infer such pragmatic meaning. This paper intends to expand research in this area by focusing on the TOEIC examination (Test of English for International Communication) in a group of fifty university students who have taken the latest version of the exam, where conversational implicatures are included in the Listening and Reading sections. Results show that learners seem to perform better in the Listening section than in the Reading section thanks to paralinguistic cues. Reading comprehension items pose more problems and might benefit from explicit instruction and a higher linguistic competence.

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