DEVELOPING ENGLISH PRIMARY LEARNERS’ PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC APPROACH

Abstract

The article presents practical ways to harmonize English teaching by balancing linguistic, sociolinguistic competences with the pragmatic one at primary school. We employ psycholinguistic approach to facilitate close to real life communication in the classroom. The PURPOSE of this paper is to reveal an experimental psycholinguistic shift from prioritizing linguistic with the elements of sociolinguistic competences to a more balanced model of teaching speaking young primary learners, which resembles natural communication and includes pragmatic competence too. METHODS: The paper presents the results of an action research carried out among 9-10-year old schoolchildren from 3 primary schools. During the research, we turned to interviewing teachers and learners, used questionnaires and observation. We employed analysis and experiment during the intervention. The RESULTS reveal students’ interactive problems while speaking in English realized in their bodies, articulatory blockages predetermined by emotional and psychological tension as well as the lack of appropriate language and pragmatic skills. In CONCLUSIONS, we have developed a range of recommendations with examples to facilitate teacher’s work with primary students’ pragmatic competence along with linguistic and sociocultural ones.