Have you ever wondered how children develop the ability to introduce, maintain, and also close a topic of conversation? Well, there is a great deal of learning that goes into our young children’s minds within the arena of social communication. Pragmatics is the term used to describe the social aspect of language, and how we “use” our chosen words with others. Although it is essential for parents to continuously work on enhancing a young child’s understanding and verbal expression, pragmatic development can be considered the icing on the cake with regard to language development.
We can all remember having interactions with people whereby either a lack of eye contact, difficulties with staying on topic, and perhaps an abrupt ending to a conversation may have left us feeling a bit awkward. Pragmatic skills are learned at a very early age, and it is carried with us throughout our adult lives. Parents should take the time to have short conversations, throughout the course of one’s day, to allow for opportunities to teach, through modeling of target, pragmatic goals.
For our preschool students, there are numerous pragmatic functions to be taught which allow for greater social language expansion. The areas of requesting (yes or no questions, “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “why” questions), action requests (i.e. give me), description identifications (i.e. that’s my ball), responses (that’s not a dog), conversational devices such as politeness markers (i.e. please, thanks), and also communication functions (i.e. the protesting of objects — “don’t touch the car”) are all appropriate teachings.
It is exciting to learn the pragmatic aspects of our language. The more we teach our children pragmatics, the more we increase the likelihood of molding them into well-rounded, polite, and socially integrated children.
Thomas C. Daus is a speech-language pathologist. For further information on pragmatic development strategies, and also an overall understanding of speech and language development, visit speak
