As teaching pragmatic competence is considered to be one of the neglected aspects in English language teaching in Japan, this paper investigates the teaching of conversational English implicature of 126 Japanese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners. University student participants were divided into three groups and given a multiple choice test and a sentence-combining test. In one group, the explanations of rules were given by a teacher; in the second, consciousness-raising tasks evolved from group discussion. The third group was a control. All subjects received a pre-test and two post-tests. Results indicate that experimental groups generated significantly better responses. In addition, no subjects extracted the expected pragmatic generalizations from the treatment that they were applying to the new items. Also, the conscious-raising groups performed better in the post-test than in the pre-test, and they had significantly higher scores in the guessing of items on the first post-test than the pre-test. Results confirm that teaching conversational implicature through explicit explanations of rules and consciousness-raising tasks is highly facilitative, amount of time and exposure to the pragmatic system may be a crucial factor to induction, and it may be advantageous for learners to process language on their own through consciousness-raising tasks. (Contains 20 references.) (Author/NAV)