Pragmatic Competence in EFL: The Impact of Multimodality on Interpreting Conversational Implicatures

Abstract

This study examines the impact of modality (textual vs. multimodal) on EFL learners' ability to interpret conversational implicatures across different proficiency levels accurately. 120 English majors (120 EFL learners (at two proficiency levels) and five native English speakers) at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University during the ^first term of 2022 completed an innovative multimodal task in which they wrote their interpretations of conversational implicatures. The mean scores of the proficiency groups were determined using descriptive statistics. A one-way ANOVA was used to identify significant differences across groups, and post-hoc analysis was utilized to determine areas of significance. The findings indicated that accurate interpretations of conversational implicatures correlated positively with language proficiency and multimodality. Additionally, after controlling for proficiency level, EFL learners' interpretations were more accurate in multimodal than textual tasks. This conclusion indicates that multimodal approaches may be more effective than the traditional and dominant textual approaches for revealing EFL learners’ ability to interpret pragmatic conversational implicatures.