The use of linguistic units and their implicatures in the listening section of TOEFL iBT test

Abstract

Implicature is a means of conveying what speakers mean linguistically, and it is most commonly used in spoken language. Identifying the possible interpretations and discovering the implied meanings of the information, nevertheless, are really challenging for non-native English speakers, especially for ESL/EFL test-takers who are under testing pressure. This descriptive study, therefore, aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively explore the language units and their implicatures used in the listening section of TOEFL iBT (Test of English as a Foreign Language versioned Internet-based test). A corpus consisting of 87 lectures, 97 long conversations, and 31 short conversations/adjacency pairs that were sourced from TOEFL iBT materials was developed. The framework employed to analyze data was based on the initial lists of triggers proposed by Gazdar (1979), Grice (1978), Levinson (1993), and Yule (1996). The findings reveal that linking words are the most common linguistic units while set phrases are the least common ones that are used to trigger implicatures in the listening section of TOEFL iBT materials. Additionally, diverse implicatures of linguistic units used in the listening section of TOEFL iBT are uncovered.