Enhancing EFL Learners' Linguistic Inferences through Pragmatic Implicatures

Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, University of Algiers 2 (Tam High School), course: Linguistics, Pragmatics, language: English, abstract: The objectives of this dissertation are the following: Investigate the relationship between EFL learning and making linguistic inferences through pragmatic implicatures. Examine the effect of pragmatic implicatures on EFL learners' linguistic inferences. Explain why students succeed or fail at making the correct linguistic inferences through pragmatic implicatures. Grice's Implicature is a fundamental concept in Pragmatics in which the second participant infers the speaker's unstated meaning when producing a particular utterance within a general or specific context. Nonetheless, conversational participants, such as EFL learners, may fail to interpret the intended meaning of newly-inserted utterances in the EFL context. Therefore, the current dissertation highlights the effect of the Gricean Implicature, namely conversational implicature, on EFL learners' linguistic inferences in the EFL context. It hypothesizes that applying conversational implicatures in EFL classroom activities can enhance male and female EFL learners' linguistic inferences. It can also motivate them to interpret the implicit meaning behind the target utterances, reaching effective and successful communication. Besides, it attempts to explain why EFL learners succeed or fail at making the correct linguistic inferences of the target conversational implicatures. The researcher conducts quantitative and qualitative analyses to test and validate the dissertation's hypotheses. She collects data by directly observing students' performance, asking open-ended questions, and implementing a writing phase to push the students to act upon the target conversational implicatures, thus enhancing their linguistic inferences and maintaining effective communication during the English session