An investigation into the ability of South African students at Stellenbosch University to interpret implicatures in their second language English

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:Due to increasing concern about the low levels of throughput at university level, and with anever-growing awareness of the important role that students' academic literacy plays in academicsuccess, Stellenbosch University implemented language support courses in various facultiesacross the campus. In addition, the massification of higher education means that the demographicprofile of the student population in university classrooms has changed, and lecturers areincreasingly faced with students from a variety of multicultural contexts. It is within this contextthat a study was done to determine to what extent linguistic and cultural background affects aspeaker's ability to derive meaning from conversational and, by extension, academicimplicatures in English. Previous studies have found that native speakers (NSs) and nonnativespeakers (NNSs) of English infer different meanings when confronted with particular types ofimplicature and that NNSs tend to interpret certain types of implicature correctly more often thanothers. First-year students at Stellenbosch University with a variety of mother tongues wereasked to complete a questionnaire containing various types of implicatures. Their responsesindicated significant differences in the accuracy with which NSs and NNSs interpreted certaintypes of implicatures, and in the meanings they arrived at. The thesis considers possible reasonsfor these differences, and discusses the implications of the study's results for academicliteracy/language support courses offered at South African universities.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University