The Success of Parents' Indirect Techniques for Teaching Their Preschoolers Pragmatic Skills

Parents' most commonly used technique for teaching pragmatic skills is indirect criticism of their children's pragmatic errors & omissions (eg, What do you say?) in which neither the required behaviors nor the fact that children must produce them is explicitly mentioned. A longitudinal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:First language 1988-06, Vol.8 (2), p.173-181
Main Author: Becker, Judith A
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Parents' most commonly used technique for teaching pragmatic skills is indirect criticism of their children's pragmatic errors & omissions (eg, What do you say?) in which neither the required behaviors nor the fact that children must produce them is explicitly mentioned. A longitudinal study of the effectiveness of such techniques found that five preschoolers corrected their pragmatic errors or provided omitted behaviors in response to 59% of their parents' 174 indirect comments. In only one case was a child overtly puzzled by such a comment & in only three did children misunderstand & make the wrong correction. Parents may tend to use indirect techniques once their children are relatively skilled pragmatically, so that the criticism-response sequence is routinized. Indirect techniques for teaching pragmatics also may be functional socially for parents, provide models of indirectness for children, & help children learn by placing a cognitive load on them in producing the behaviors. 1 Table, 16 References. HA
ISSN:0142-7237