Production of Conversational Implicatures by Students of the ELT Department

This study was planned to investigate prospective English language teachers’ competence in implicature production. The participants were 88 trainee teachers who were studying English language teaching in the first, second and third years in a university in Cyprus. They were given an Implicature Production Instruments with twelve situations, and they were asked to respond according to the situations in an implicit way. The results showed that female participants used more implicatures than the male participants, older participants used more implicatures and that the third year participants used more implicatures as compared to the other years. The second-year group was not homogenous regarding implicature production. The outcomes indicated that although pragmatic competence concerning implicature production may develop naturally. English language learners and trainee teachers need to be supported regarding pragmatic competence in the same way as they are supported in other competency areas.