competence Bachman, 1990: 87. Increasing the pragmatic competence of English enables us to live together harmoniously in this global village.
This English pragmatic competence is even more needed because we will soon face the AFTA Asean Free Trade Area in 2015. It is not merely our
knowledge of English language that supports us to compete and survive, but our English pragmatic competence also takes a distinguish role. It is how we
communicate using English and also our understanding of English, especially the conveyed meaning in what is explicitly said by the speakers, will build a good and
successful communication. Based on this background, the researcher came into an idea that it is
important to conduct the present study. The present study is on the development of the students’ pragmatic competence of implicature in spoken English. The
present study is supposedly able to give a description about the development of the students’ pragmatic competence, because the pragmatic competence also takes
an important part in communication. The notion of implicature is chosen because implicature normally occurs in almost every language including in English
language.
B. Problem Identification
Learning English language needs a meticulous consideration because learning language is not merely a matter of gaining knowledge. For centuries
some approaches and methods have been discussed, practiced, and evaluated. Richards and Rodgers mention that “at least there are three different theoretical
views of language and the nature of language proficiency explicitly or implicitly inform current approaches and methods in language teaching” Richards and
Rodgers, 2001: 20. These are the structural view, the functional view, and the interactional view.
Linguists also provide meaningful contributions. One of the important ones is by Noam Chomsky as cited in Fromkin V, et el, 2003: 3, “when we
study human language, we are approaching what might call the human essence, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.”
Fromkin 2003: 3 explains further that to understand our humanity, one must understand the nature of language that makes us human. In correlation with this,
Meyer 2009: 1 adds that to study language, linguists focus on two levels of description: pragmatics, the study of how context both social and linguistic
affects language use, and grammar, the description of how human form linguistic structures, from the level of sound up to the sentence ibid. This contribution
brings about changes in language teaching approach dating from the late 1960’s to what so called Communicative Language Teaching which started to be known
after Hyme’s theory of communicative 1972 was elaborated by some writers such as Brumfit and Johnson 1979 and Savigon 1983.
Later on, Bachman 1990 introduces Language Competence. Bachman proposes that language competence is subdivided into two components
‘organizational competence’ and ‘pragmatic competence’ Bachman, 1990: 87 ff. Organizational competence comprises knowledge of linguistic unit and joining
them together at the level of sentence and discourse. According to Bachman
1990, Pragmatic competence is subdivided into ‘illocutionary competence’ and ‘sociolinguistic competence’. ‘Illocutionary competence’ can be categorized as
‘knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out’, while ‘sociolinguistic competence’ means the ability to use language appropriately
according to context. Fraser 1990 gives further explanation that sociolinguistic competence includes the ability to select communicative acts and appropriate
strategies to implement them depending on the current status of the ‘conversational contract’.
Dealing with pragmatic competence, there have been some studies conducted in the second language acquisition field. Some of them are in
producing English request done by Scarcella 1979, Cathcart 1986, Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1986, House and Kasper 1987, Hill 1997, and Rose 2000 with
the result as it is stated by Ellis 2008: 176: “One of the strongest findings of these studies is that even advanced learners do not acquire fully native-like ways
of requesting, in particular, then to produce longer request than native speakers.” While the students’ refusals production was studied by Beebe and Takashashi
1989 and also by Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford 1991, and the results are: “First, L2 learners’ pragmatic behavior is not always in accordance with stereotypical
views. Second, although advanced L2 learners have no difficulty in performing refusals, they do not always do so in the same way as native speakers.” Ellis,
2008: 189 Some other studies on pragmatic competence are also done by Pinyo,
Aksornjarung, and Laohawiriyanon 2010 Pragmatic Competence in Request: A
