A Review on Second Language Learners’ Irony Comprehension

Irony, as a pragmatic tool, is often used in daily conversation by native speakers. However, for second-language learners, irony comprehension can be a barrier in conversation when they try to understand native speakers’ usage of this pragmatic tool. This study aims to identify factors that are critical for irony comprehension and find out training methods that address these issues to improve second-language learners’ ability of comprehending irony. To this end, we review studies about (1) native speakers’ irony comprehension, highlighting three factors that play an important role: intonation, common ground, and context; (2) second-language learners’ implicature comprehension, elaborating the role of two kinds of factors: within-implicature factors and learner-related factors; (3) second-language learners’ irony comprehension and training projects that help improve this ability, finding out the key difficulties of irony comprehension for language learners and the ways to improve. In addition, this study also proposed some future directions for this line of research.