Teaching English as a foreign language has gone through vast changes in the recent decades. Developing communicative language competence has become one of the key goals of education and meaningful communicative language practice has been found as an effective way of achieving these goals. Pragmatic competence is one of the three main groups of competences of communicative language competence and it refers to the ability of using linguistic means of language with the aim of achieving communicative goals in everyday language use. This study aims at investigating the development of pragmatic competence of young learners through the implementation of a number of meaningful communication activities into EFL classes. A qualitative enquiry conducted with two groups of primary school pupils in a Slovak primary school demonstrates the importance of meaningful communicative activities in the lessons, reveals their impact on pupil’s oral production from learners’ perspective, and also indicates their positive and negative aspects. The results show that despite having low proficiency levels, young learners appreciate and enjoy meaningful language practice activities, find them advantageous for their everyday language use, and what is more, prefer them over mechanical and controlled language practice.

Keywords: Young learners, pragmatic competence, communicative language competence, meaningful activities, oral production, EFL.