On Characteristics Of Children’s Pragmatic Competence From Family Show

It is known to all that children have better plasticity than adults. People all know that children can change and improve themselves much easier than adults. Therefore, if people want to communicate with other people and express themselves better, they should develop their pragmatic competence in their early age.This thesis tries to explore the characteristics of children’s pragmatic competence from the TV program Family Show as well as the possible reasons of these characteristics. The analyses are from the perspective of children’s psychological development. This thesis intends to offer children’s language teaching and training of children’s social abilities some help.This thesis has six chapters.The first chapter is the introduction.The second chapter is the literature review. This chapter has two main parts: pragmatic competence and children’s language.The third chapter is the theoretical framework. This part mainly introduces Piaget’s theories of children’s psychological development. One is his Cognitive Development Theory; the other is his Language Development Theory.The fourth chapter is about the characteristics of children’s pragmatic competence. They are:children from three to six years old tend to violate Cooperation Principle unconsciously; they incline to violate Politeness Principle unconsciously; they can’t understand conversational implicatures very well; they have a tendency to change topics; and they start to employ some strategies to express themselves, for example, circumbendibus.The fifth chapter uses Piaget’s theories of children’s psychological development to analyze the possible reasons of these characteristics. Children from three to six years old belong to Piaget’s Pre-operational stage. The findings are very impressive:they are lack of cognitive ability, and social cultural knowledge. Besides, they are egocentric.The sixth chapter is the conclusion. All these findings may help people understand children’s utterances in a better way and communicate with them much more successfully. Besides, people, especially the parents and educators could find out more ways to help children learn to use language and express themselves correctly and fluently. However, this thesis is only a beginning which needs further verifications and complements.