Literacy
Melanie Pizzonia
St Raphael's School
Pragmatics
There are socially constructed rules that guide how individuals interact with each other. The rules guide turn taking, greetings, eye-contact, body language and the way individuals are referenced in conversations.
These rules can be described as the pragmatics of oral language and they are often implicitly learnt. However, not all children develop an understanding of pragmatics by simply being immersed in social situations.
For some children, the explicit teaching of social language and the way language varies according to its contexts is needed. Raban (2014) suggests, “consolidating implicit awareness with explicit understanding” (p. 6). Pragmatics can be thought of in terms of both expressive and receptive language, that is, the social conventions of both speaking and listening, in an Australian context.
At St. Raphael's we teach rules of pragmatics through many different ways:
- Purposeful set up of investigation areas
- Role playing
- Acting out a situation to demonstrate appropriate responses
- Character interviews
- Making classroom displays highlighting how to ask for common classroom requests
- Using picture story books that focus on conflict and model what can be said and how it can be said, when solving the conflict
- Defining different vocabulary and its uses
Pragmatics is learnt from the moment we are born and as we grow it develops and gets stronger. Can you spot the pragmatics being used in the following video?