The Pragmatics Profile of Everyday Communication Skills in Children
The Pragmatics Profile of Everyday Communication Skills in Children, originally developed in 1988 by Hazel Dewart and Susie Summers, has been used extensively by Speech and Language Therapists for many years. It was initially intended for use with pre-school aged children, however it was extended for use with children up to the age of 10 years when a revised edition was published in 1995.
This was identified the need for an approach that explored everyday communication skills in children. The traditional approaches, such as standardised assessment and testing children within clinical settings, were felt to be limiting the understanding of how children communicate in a range of environments with a variety of communication partners. The development of the Profile was intended to provide practitioners with a means of collecting information about a child’s communication skills outside the clinical setting, and focused more on their communication abilities within everyday life. The Profile was based on the pragmatic approach to understanding language which emphasises how communication is achieved, how language is used to communicate a variety of intentions, the related needs of the listener, and how children participate in conversation and discourse.
