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Advancing Intercultural Education Through ELT: Corpus-Driven Work With Conversational Implicatures
Aglaia Rouki
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2025.12.002
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
This article evaluates a corpus-supported approach to teaching conversational implicature in Greek secondary schools, with the dual aim of developing learners’ pragmatic skills and intercultural awareness. Sixty junior-high students were assigned to either an experimental or control condition. The experimental cohort engaged with the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to examine real-world dialogic excerpts, build “language maps”, and rehearse meanings through structured role-plays. Relative to the control group, the experimental group achieved a 28% gain in average scores, and between-group differences were statistically significant (p < 0.01). Post-intervention interviews indicated deeper recognition of language’s cultural underpinnings and high learner acceptance. Overall, the study evidences that corpus integration in English language instruction can robustly promote intercultural learning and pragmatic competence.
conversational implicature, corpus-based pedagogy, pragmatic competence, intercultural education, English language teaching (ELT)
Aglaia Rouki, Advancing Intercultural Education Through ELT: Corpus-Driven Work With Conversational Implicatures. US-China Foreign Language, December 2025, Vol. 23, No. 12, 462-467 doi:10.17265/1539-8080/2025.12.002
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