Somayeh Asghari - Department of English Language Teaching, Golestan Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Gorgan, Iran
Ali Derakhshan - Assistant Professor, Department of English Language Teaching, Gorgan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Gorgan, Iran & Department of English Language Teaching, GolestanScinence and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Gorgan, Iran

Conversational implicature is an area subsumed under interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) and its importance in expressing a message indirectly is well established (Grice, 1975). Members of different cultures have different understanding of implicature from the same utterance in essentially the same context. The present research has shown that the learners may have several difficulties in understanding and comprehension, apart from learners’ language general background knowledge. As a result, the context may be misunderstood. Therefore, the necessity of implicature knowledge is considered essential. The purpose of this study is an evaluation of how well learners, particularly EFL learners understand so-called implicatures of English utterances with different levels of language proficiency. The present study aimes to investigate whether there is any relationship between EFL learners’ proficiency level and their implicature knowledge. To do so, 32 femle upper-intermidiate students participated in the study. First, the Oxford Placement test was administered for homogenizing the students and they were divided into two groups of low and high proficient learners. Then, Implicature Listening Comprehension Test (Derakhshan, 2014) including 26 items was administered. The results of Pearson Correlation revealed that there was a positive correlation between language proficiency and implicature knowledge. The findings of the study showed, the EFL learners would be able to comprehend the context more easily by expanding their proficiency in second language. Then, amplifying the knowledge of implicature for a successful communication can be a solution to a poor communication

Conversational Implicature, Cooperative Principal, Pragmatics, Speech Acts