Pragmatic Skills

[Guest]

As part of my assignment one of the questions is What do you understand by ther term pragmatic skills and list the pragmatic skills that are important in terms of developing effective comm abilities and give a practical example of an exercise that could be used in the classroom.

My mind has gone blank on this, I have been searching on google but cannot find any examples or ideas.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

[Guest]

Hi February

 

Not really clever enough to answer your question - but noticed it was your first post so I wanted to welcome you aboard.

 

Someone with intelligence will be along shortly with words of wisdom, I'm sure.

 

In the meantime, enjoy the forum!

 

Maz

 

PS What are you studying at present?

[Guest]

Hi Maz

Thanks for your welcome, I'm sure I will find the group very useful looking through the posts and articles. I am doing a Classroom Assistant Course which I'm doing distance learning.

February

[Guest]

Hi and welcome from me too,

 

I looked up the word Pragmatic on my thesaurus;

 

Practical

Realistic

Hard-headed

Hard-nosed

Sensible

Matter-of-fact

No-nonsense

down to earth

 

(and the opposite being- Idealistic)

 

So in terms of developing effective communication using pragmatic skills I would think of ways to enable Listening, conventions of conversation, language for thinking, language for communication in ways that are within the childrens context ( down to earth - realistic), using practical methods such as role modelling and role play.

 

hope this helps and doesn't confuse. I don't know the context of your assignement and have only come up with this suggestion from the above definitions.

 

Peggy

[Susan]

Welcome february!

Ive not come across that terminology before, but Peggy's breakdown sounds as if it might help to get you going???

[Gezabel]

Welcome from me too!

Hope this may be of some help.

 

Pragmatic skills include:

1.knowing that you have to answer when a question has been asked;

2. being able to participate in a conversation by taking it in turns with the other speaker;

3. the ability to notice and respond to the non-verbal aspects of language;

4. awareness that you have to introduce a topic of conversation in order for the listener to fully understand;

5. knowing which words or what sort of sentence-type to use when initiating a conversation or responding to something someone has said;

6. the ability to maintain a topic;

7. the ability to maintain appropriate eye-contact (not too much staring, and not too much looking away) during a conversation; and

8. the ability to distinguish how to talk and behave towards different communicative partners

 

It comes from http://members.tripod.com/Caroline_Bowen/devel1.htm a site all about Speech and Language Development in young children. Fascinating stuff!

Good luck with the assignment.

Edited July 7, 2005 by Geraldine

[Guest]

Thanks Peggy, Geraldine, Susan, that has given me something to go on, and the website looks like it will help.

 

Thanks again

 

[Guest]

That's an excellent answer from Geraldine!

 

I may have come to this too late, & my contribution may be irrelevant, but you just might come up with something useful if you do a Google search for Semantic Pragmatic Disorder.

 

Hope it helps

[Guest]

Thanks Weightman, I will try google with that.