LISTENING AND PRAGMATICS

[FT]Pragmatic competence involves the ability to convey one's intentions and comprehend others’ intentions by using linguistic resources and contextual cues. This chapter addresses the comprehension dimension of pragmatic competence, focusing on second language (L2) learners’ inferential skills in listening. The chapter has five sections. The first section presents theoretical frameworks and key concepts that explain the process of inferencing (Grice's maxims; Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory). The second section surveys existing studies that have used a listening instrument to examine L2 comprehension of implied meaning (e.g., conversational implicature and sarcasm). Focusing on prosody, the third section reviews studies that examined L2 listeners’ ability to recognize speakers’ vocal qualities (e.g., intonation, stress) to infer their communicative intentions. Trends and generalizations coming from these two bodies of empirical findings are discussed in the fourth section, along with directions for future research in the final section. Pedagogical implications in terms of how to teach implicature comprehension are also presented.