Adapting Grice’s Conversational Implicature in the Listening Comprehension of CET-4

This paper aims to analyze the short conversations in the listening comprehension of CET-4 from the perspective of pragmatics. Grice’s conversational implicature can be adapted to the teaching of listening by providing both teachers and students with a way of how particular utterance meanings are conveyed and decoded in specific contexts of situation, which can both enhance the students’ language use ability and improve their performance on the listening test of CET-4. In this paper, through interview and categorizing some real test items which can be interpreted from the pragmatics perspective, the author argues that although the students’ inadequate practices and limited vocabulary partly account for the errors made in these tests, ignorance of unfamiliarity with pragmatics theories is also an important contributor to test mistakes.