A student can have age-appropriate vocabulary, produce complete sentences, and answer classroom questions accurately—yet still struggle when communication becomes less predictable.
They may not know how to enter a peer activity they want to join. They may repeat the same message when a listener does not understand. They may provide too little background information when telling a story, misunderstand an indirect request from a teacher, or know the answer to a social scenario on a worksheet but have difficulty using the same strategy during recess.
These are examples of social communication, often referred to more narrowly as pragmatic language.
For elementary school students, pragmatic intervention may address conversation, communication repair, inference, social reasoning, narrative, peer interaction, self-advocacy, and the ability to adapt communication according to the listener and context.
The goals should not be selected because they appear on a popular goal bank. They should follow assessment.
ASHA defines social communication broadly as an interaction among pragmatics, social interaction, social cognition, and language processing. Current guidance also emphasizes that social norms differ across cultures, communities, families, and individuals. The clinical question is therefore not whether a student behaves according to one standardized social script. It is whether the student’s communication allows them to participate effectively in the environments and relationships that are relevant to them.
For school-based services, the same principle has an educational dimension. Under IDEA, annual goals must be measurable and designed to address disability-related needs that affect participation and progress in the general education curriculum or other educational needs arising from the disability.
A well-written pragmatic goal therefore connects:
present level → communication breakdown → educational or functional impact → target skill → measurement → generalization
The following ten goals illustrate that process. They are examples, not goals to copy automatically.
What Is Pragmatic Language?
Pragmatics concerns how language is used to accomplish a purpose in social contexts. That includes far more than taking turns politely.
ASHA’s current social-communication framework includes:
Social communication also depends on structural language.
A student who appears to have trouble with pragmatics may actually be having difficulty with complex syntax, vocabulary, language processing, working memory, narrative organization, or inferencing.
For example, a student who repeatedly gives an unrelated answer during peer conversation may not simply need “topic maintenance.” They may not have understood what the peer said.
Assessment should identify the source of the breakdown before the goal is written.
Pragmatic Language Is Especially Important During the Elementary School Years
Social and academic communication becomes considerably more complex between approximately ages 6 and 12.
ASHA’s current school-age social-communication benchmarks include increasingly sophisticated conversation, topic extension, communication repair, narrative organization, metapragmatic awareness, persuasion, opinion sharing, sarcasm recognition, and understanding of other people’s perspectives and emotional states.
The classroom itself also becomes linguistically demanding. Students are expected to:
Pragmatic-language difficulties can therefore affect academic participation as well as peer interaction.
The Social Communication Intervention Project, a randomized controlled trial involving school-age children with pragmatic and social-communication difficulties, found treatment-related improvements in blind-rated conversational competence, parent-reported pragmatic functioning and social communication, and teacher-rated classroom learning skills. The intervention did not significantly improve its primary structural-language outcome, underscoring that social-communication treatment may affect functional communication differently from general language ability.
A Pragmatic Goal Should Describe a Communication Skill, Not a Personality Trait
One of the weaknesses of older pragmatic goal banks is their reliance on vague words such as appropriate, expected, friendly, normal, or good social skills.
Consider:
“Student will use appropriate body language.”
What exactly counts as appropriate? Does the student need to face the speaker? Nod? Smile? Keep their hands still? Maintain eye contact?
Those behaviors vary among cultures, individuals, communication communities, and neurotypes.
ASHA specifically states that eye contact, facial expressions, proximity, posture, tone, gesture, and other social behaviors must be interpreted within the individual’s communication context rather than according to a single set of norms.
A stronger goal describes what the student needs to accomplish.
Instead of “use appropriate body language,” consider:
During cooperative classroom activities, the student will signal attention or understanding through an established response such as verbal acknowledgment, gesture, body orientation, AAC response, or another effective communication behavior in 4 of 5 observed opportunities.
Now the goal measures communication.
1. Initiating or Entering an Interaction
Initiation is a common pragmatic target, but the goal should not assume that every student should initiate conversations at the same frequency.
A student may need intervention when they want or need to communicate but cannot reliably enter the interaction.
For example, a child may stand beside a group at recess but not know how to join the game. Another may have a question during class but wait until the assignment is over rather than approaching the teacher. Another may want to tell a peer about something that happened but begin without enough context for the peer to understand.
The goal should identify the relevant context and communication function.
Example Goal
When the student indicates interest in joining a familiar peer activity, they will use one established entry strategy—such as asking to join, making a relevant comment, offering an idea, or using another preferred communication modality—in 4 of 5 observed opportunities with no more than one prompt.
This is more useful than:
“Student will initiate a conversation for three minutes.”
The first goal measures whether the student can access an interaction they want to enter. The second measures duration without telling us whether the conversation was successful or desired.
ASHA includes initiating spontaneous communication and accessing peer groups among social-communication abilities that may be evaluated and treated when they affect participation.
2. Maintaining Reciprocal Conversation
Turn-taking remains an appropriate pragmatic target when the difficulty involves reciprocal interaction. But simply counting turns can be misleading.
A student might participate in six turns while saying unrelated information each time. Another might participate in only three turns but respond directly to what their partner said, add information, and close the conversation naturally.
What matters is contingency—whether one contribution connects with the previous contribution.
ASHA includes social reciprocity, responsiveness, adjacency, and topic-contingent communication within pragmatics.
Example Goal
During a mutually selected conversation or cooperative activity, the student will respond to a partner’s contribution and add related information, a relevant question, or an acknowledgment for at least three reciprocal exchanges in 4 of 5 observed interactions.
This goal is preferable to “take turns appropriately” because it defines what conversational reciprocity actually looks like.
Conversation Should Not Be Measured by Length Alone
The original goal required maintaining a conversation for three minutes. Duration can be useful in some cases, but it should not automatically be treated as the criterion.
A successful exchange may last 45 seconds. A forced conversation can last five minutes.
For an elementary student, better measures may include the number of contingent exchanges, independent responses, topic extensions, successful communication repairs, or performance across different partners.
The measurement should correspond with the communication problem identified during assessment.
3. Maintaining and Shifting Topics
Topic management is a classic pragmatic-language skill.
ASHA’s school-age benchmarks specifically include increased ability to maintain, extend, and manage conversational topics.
A student may have difficulty when they:
The goal should not require the student to stay on one topic indefinitely. Real conversations shift.
The useful skill is maintaining enough continuity that communication partners can follow the exchange.
Example Goal
During conversation with a peer or adult, the student will maintain or appropriately shift the topic by contributing information that relates to the preceding exchange and, when changing topics, provide sufficient transition or context in 4 of 5 opportunities.
For a younger elementary student, this can be simplified:
During a three-turn conversation, the student will contribute a response related to the shared topic in 4 of 5 opportunities with visual support as needed.
4. Repairing Communication Breakdowns
Communication repair is one of the most functional pragmatic goals an SLP can target.
Everyone is misunderstood sometimes. The relevant skill is knowing what to do next.
A student may currently repeat the exact same sentence louder, walk away, become frustrated, say “never mind,” or continue talking without recognizing that the listener is confused.
ASHA identifies communication breakdown and repair as a core element of pragmatic communication and specifically includes rephrasing when misunderstood among social-communication skills.
Example Goal
When a communication partner indicates that a message was unclear, the student will repair the message by repeating, rephrasing, adding relevant information, pointing, demonstrating, or using another established communication modality in 4 of 5 observed opportunities.
This goal can be practiced naturally.
Student: “Give me that one.”
SLP: “I’m not sure which one you mean.”
The student may respond:
“The blue marker next to your notebook.”
That is a communication repair.
Why Repair Is Often More Useful Than “Speak Clearly”
A goal such as “use clear communication” does not tell the clinician what to teach.
Repair is observable. It also transfers across speech, language, AAC, classroom discussion, peer interaction, and community communication.
For many students, learning several repair strategies provides more independence than expecting them never to experience a misunderstanding.
5. Asking for Clarification When Information Is Not Understood
Communication repair and clarification are related but different.
Repair occurs when the listener did not understand the student. Clarification occurs when the student did not understand someone else.
This distinction is particularly important in school.
A student may appear inattentive or noncompliant when the actual problem is that they do not understand an unfamiliar word, an indirect instruction, a long sentence, an ambiguous pronoun, or which part of a multistep task the teacher is referring to.
Teaching the student to say only “What?” may not solve the problem. More specific clarification can be taught.
Example Goal
When spoken information is unclear or incomplete during classroom or peer activities, the student will independently request clarification by asking for repetition, identifying the part they did not understand, requesting an example, or asking a relevant question in 4 of 5 opportunities.
Possible strategies include:
This is simultaneously a pragmatic-language skill and a self-advocacy skill.
Comprehension Monitoring Is an Important School Skill
Students do not always know when they have misunderstood something.
Treatment can therefore include comprehension monitoring—learning to recognize that the information does not make sense or is incomplete.
The Social Communication Intervention Project specifically included comprehension monitoring among its intervention components for school-age students with pragmatic communication difficulties.
This makes clarification a particularly relevant educational goal.
6. Providing Enough Information for the Listener
Children gradually learn that another person does not automatically know everything they know.
This influences conversation, directions, stories, classroom explanations, and peer interaction.
Suppose a student enters the room and says:
“He took it and then she got mad.”
The speaker knows who he, she, and it refer to. The listener may not.
A pragmatic goal can target presupposition and listener knowledge: deciding what information another person needs.
Example Goal
When explaining an event, giving directions, or sharing information with a listener who was not present, the student will provide sufficient identifying and contextual information for the listener to determine who or what is being discussed in 4 of 5 probes.
For example, instead of “She took it,” the student might say:
“Maya took my blue marker during art.”
The goal is not simply to produce a longer sentence. It is to provide the information needed by this listener.
This Skill Also Matters Academically
Students use pragmatic language when they explain how they solved a math problem, describe a science experiment, retell a historical event, give directions, or explain why they disagree with an answer.
ASHA includes discourse, cohesion, coherence, quantity of information, and listener needs within social communication.
Pragmatic goals therefore do not need to be restricted to playground conversations.
7. Understanding Inference, Indirect Language, and Ambiguity
Elementary-school communication becomes increasingly dependent on information that is not stated directly.
A teacher says:
“It’s getting pretty noisy in here.”
The literal statement describes the room. The intended communication may be “lower your voices.”
A peer says:
“I guess I’ll do the whole project myself.”
The intended message may involve frustration.
A character in a story says:
“Great. Another rainy day.”
Context and prosody may indicate that great does not mean what it usually means literally.
ASHA includes inference, nonliteral language, ambiguity, indirect language, and contextual interpretation within school-age social communication.
Example Goal
Given a spoken, written, or pictured social or academic situation containing indirect, ambiguous, or implied information, the student will explain a reasonable interpretation and identify at least one contextual clue supporting that interpretation in 4 of 5 opportunities.
The phrase reasonable interpretation is deliberate. Social situations can have more than one plausible explanation.
Teach Evidence, Not Mind Reading
A weaker pragmatic activity might ask “What is she thinking?” and accept only one answer.
A stronger activity asks “What might she be thinking?” and then “What makes you think that?”
This requires the student to connect interpretation with the words, situation, prior events, prosody, or observable behavior.
The objective is social reasoning, not guessing an invisible mental state with certainty.
8. Negotiating, Disagreeing, and Solving Peer Problems
Elementary students do not only exchange information. They negotiate, disagree, decide rules, divide tasks, argue about whose turn it is, and decide what game to play.
These interactions require pragmatic language.
ASHA includes conflict resolution, cooperative interaction, social reasoning, and peer-related social competence within social communication.
Example Goal
During a structured or naturally occurring peer disagreement, the student will communicate their own preference or concern, acknowledge relevant information from the peer, and propose or respond to at least one possible solution in 4 of 5 opportunities with supports faded as appropriate.
This is much more specific than “use appropriate social skills.”
A student can learn language such as:
These are functional peer-communication strategies.
Peer Interaction Should Not Be Practiced Only With Adults
A student may solve social scenarios perfectly with an SLP and still have difficulty using the skill with classmates.
This is not surprising. Peer communication is faster, less predictable, and less supportive than clinician-led interaction.
Research supports moving social-communication intervention into natural interaction where possible.
A systematic review of pragmatic interventions in DLD found that treatment has been delivered successfully through individual, small-group, and larger-group models, often targeting conversation and narrative. However, intervention procedures and intensity varied substantially, making it difficult to prescribe one universal treatment model.
For autistic elementary-school students, a systematic review of peer-mediated interventions found that most included studies reported improvements in targeted social skills, although follow-up data were limited and maintenance findings were mixed.
If the goal concerns peer communication, progress should eventually be observed with peers.
9. Self-Advocacy, Refusal, and Communication Boundaries
This goal category is missing from many older pragmatic-language lists. Yet it may be one of the most important.
Students need language not only to join interactions. They also need language to:
These are pragmatic-language skills.
Example Goal
When a communication, sensory, academic, or peer situation becomes difficult, the student will independently communicate an appropriate self-advocacy message—such as requesting help, clarification, additional processing time, a break, a change in communication method, or an end to the interaction—in 4 of 5 relevant opportunities.
The student’s communication modality may include speech, gesture, AAC, writing, or another established system.
ASHA’s ICF framework emphasizes goals that improve participation in activities relevant to the child rather than limiting intervention to impairment-level behaviors.
Refusal Is Communication
A child who says “No” has successfully communicated something.
That does not mean every refusal must be granted. It means the communication itself should be recognized.
Similarly, a student who says “I don’t want to talk right now” has used pragmatic language to establish a boundary.
A treatment program that teaches children how to join conversations but not how to exit, refuse, or advocate for themselves presents an incomplete model of social communication.
This consideration is particularly important for neurodivergent students.
ASHA’s current autism guidance states that intervention should build skills that improve daily functioning without forcing autistic people to mask autistic traits or lose their identity.
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