Pragmatic Abilities of School-Aged Students and Materials that Can Be Used to Develop Pragmatic Competence

Abstract

(200) - A discussion of language pedagogy would be inadequate without mentioning the field of pragmatism. We define pragmatics as the principles that guide how people use language, such as where and how to say something. These accepted standards are crucial to our communication in any social scenario, and without them, our learning process will inevitably be
restricted to language use. As it is commonly accepted fact that pragmatic competence develops stage by stage as a child grows up from being able to understand only direct speech without any need to read between the lines to an adult who will unconsciously, as often said, feel the actual meaning behind the words in light sarcastic statement or a criticism smoothened by a joke. All these aspects make us to analyze speech acts and include them into language teaching methodology to make the educational programs complete and real-life related. This article aims to analyze and explain the pragmatic abilities of a school aged students in a comparison between their native language and target language that they are learning. In the present literature review, readers were provided with a significant quantity of data in order to evaluate the effects of emphasizing pragmatics on second language acquisition.