Children's attributions of pragmatic intentions and early literacy¹

This study was reported earlier at the 16th World Congress of the International Reading Association. The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Jane Wakefield, who assisted with all aspects of data collection and analysis, and Mitsunori Takakuwa, for assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. The collection of data was supported by a grant to R. Watson, K. Reeder, J. Shapiro and H. Goelman from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada. Analysis of data was supported by a grant to Kenneth Reeder from the Hampton Fund, University of British Columbia.

This study aimed to determine if there were systematic links between young school‐aged children's awareness of others’ communicative intentions and early descriptive‐expository and narrative writing proficiency. Forty‐one English‐speaking children aged 6;2 to 8;9 years were shown a directive speech act in a puppet‐played scenario. An interview determined the types of illocutionary intention attributed to the Speaker in the staged speech act, and the basis upon which subjects believed they had made that attribution. Attributions and explanations were rated for sophistication. Samples of the participants's narrative and expository‐descriptive writing were judged for global quality and several quantitative and structural features. In the expository‐descriptive writing task, the older group of children who demonstrated superior pragmatic attribution ability scored significantly higher on the measure of overall writing quality and number of words produced than the younger group of children with superior pragmatic attribution ability. A similar pattern was found for the narrative writing task. The results suggest that the well‐documented improvement in writing ability around age seven involves a pragmatic component, and that such development is variable in systematic ways across different features and genres of writing.

Notes

This study was reported earlier at the 16th World Congress of the International Reading Association. The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Jane Wakefield, who assisted with all aspects of data collection and analysis, and Mitsunori Takakuwa, for assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. The collection of data was supported by a grant to R. Watson, K. Reeder, J. Shapiro and H. Goelman from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada. Analysis of data was supported by a grant to Kenneth Reeder from the Hampton Fund, University of British Columbia.