ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the links between underlying pragmatic attribution ability, children's consciousness of that ability, and the early development of narrative and expository-descriptive writing. It is just those sorts of settings and procedures that yielded earlier identification of the some of the roots of narrative development and pragmatic competence in the work of Reeder and Wakefield. The chapter determines the extent to which young school-aged children's ability to attribute pragmatic intentions was linked to the early development of expository-descriptive and narrative writing proficiency, respectively. It explains the older group of subjects who demonstrated superior pragmatic attribution ability also scored significantly higher on total words produced in the writing sample than the younger subjects with superior pragmatic attribution ability. Cummins's findings offer another way of interpreting the present study's results, children's prior and fundamental grasp of the pragmatics of interpersonal communication appears to have provided a foundation for success in the narrative genre, and in the expository-descriptive writing genre.
