Pragmatic and Conversational Skills Development in Children - Essay Example

People acquire communication skills even during their tender years and the process seems to be more complex. This brought researchers to study how children gain understanding and use conversation skills. Moreover, it was also observed that children tend to speak differently to their fellow children compared to how they converse with older people. Therefore, pragmatics also became an important aspect of the researches. The above-mentioned studies will be discussed further in this paper including the fact that there are also instances wherein conversation and pragmatic skills are affected by cases of disorders. In the modern world, children with disabilities are increasing. Nevertheless, instead of treating them as invalid, more and more advocates are suggesting that these special people should be treated as normal people who are able to do things just like the others who have no disabilities.

Therefore, it is most important to look further into these conditions and consider how their communication skills are affected in order for normal people to adjust to their conditions and understand them, instead of worsening their situations.
II. Children Discourse
Parents are known to be the first teachers of their children because as expected, they are the very first ones to be dealing with the child at home. They may not often be aware of it, but they are teaching children conversational and pragmatic skills with the way they treat them. It should be noted that it is not enough for older people to teach children words or the correct usage of the words in order to communicate effectively. It is also important to make them understand what is being said so that they would be able to react correctly. As Otong describes it, “communication is a dynamic interaction that consists of a source, who has a purpose that is understandable to another person, and an encoder, who is able to understand the meaning of the message” (2003).

For instance, when a person asks a child what his father’s name is, he should be able to tell his father’s name and not his own name. In this case, the source is the person asking the question whose purpose is to know the name of the child’s father and the child is known as the encoder. Such skill, however, does not automatically occur but is gained through constant communication with the child, identifying and explaining his relationships with the people and things around him as the child grasps the information.

This supports the nature and nurture theories that sought to simplify understanding of how children develop communication skills. Nature theory suggests that “humans have an inborn mechanism in the brain for mastering language called Language Acquisition Device (LAD)” (Santrock, 1988; Santrock, 1995; Schement, 2002; Sigelman & Rider, 2006). This so-called device is the innate factor that enables a child to learn and adjust his language skills as he communicates with the people around him.

This is basically what makes a child able to acquire an understanding of words, their meanings and uses. Eventually, as the vocabulary of a child increases, he learns how to converse with other people, using the words he acquired in a manner that he is understood.