Pragmatic skills and awareness in bilinguals : Children¿s directives in school contexts

Abstract

Bearing in mind the vast amount of research within the field of second language leruning (see McLaughlin, 1985 for a review), surprisingly little attention has been given to the pragmatic development of young L2 leruners. As pragmatic skills constitute an important part of a person's communicative competence, this is somewhat unfortunate. The present work is an attempt to investigate pragmatic aspects of young bilinguals' communicative behavior. The following sections are merely intended to give the reader a brief introduction to the concepts used and perspectives considered in the study at hand, they do not provide an extensive overview of the field of research