STRATEGIES TO DEVELOP LEXICAL AND GRAMATICAL COMPETENCE
Learning a second language has been a must for many decades, in fact many people have become proficient in a second language however many others have not reached such mastery. To study the differences in these learners has been a good search of study to develop strategies that teachers can use in the classroom to help students to foster the second language learning.
Learners need to be competent when using the target language, but how can we help them to achieve such competence? Is there a method or technique or it is a matter of talent that some people have and some others do not?
I want to start this work by defining what competence is in terms of education, it is the ability and capacity we have to carry out a determined activity using the acquired previous knowledge and using them in a creative and effective way in order to solve any problem. Chomsky (1965) separated competence from performance defining the former as the capacity and the later as the effectiveness of such competence in a behavior where it is really proved that the competence exists as it cannot be visible.
Communicative competence is the ability that is acquired to use in a proper manner a language in any situation and according to the context. This ability embraces the capacity of producing grammatically correct phrases as well as using them appropriately and the ability to use extra linguistics skills. Hymes (1973) defined it as the knowledge of the rules for understanding and producing both referential and social meaning of language. It comprises sociolinguistic competence about decisions of appropriacy of language to context, discourse competence that is the ability to construct and maintain negotiation properly coherent, strategic competence involving decisions on how to repair communication breakdowns and finally grammatical competence. Canale (1983)
Grammatical competence is the ability to use properly the language components, its syntax, morphologic inflections, lexical and phonologic resources as well as the orthographic system. As a part of it, we have lexical competence, it is the ability we have to recognize and use correctly words in a language. Lexical competence includes understanding the different relationships among families of words and the collocations of them.
Being defined the above competences, it is important to know what we can do to help our students to develop such abilities. In my own opinion the competencies we need to focus on since these are the most important are the lexical and grammatical, this is because being competent in such we can use them as scaffolding to develop communicative competence that is the main objective of any language course.
A strategy to develop lexical competence is to teach affixes, prefixes and suffixes as well as the root of words, in this way students are able to recognize a wide range of words and word families. To this regards it is also necessary to teach the rules as well as the exceptions.
A strategy to develop grammatical competence is through the comprehensible input. According to Krashen (1983) explicit teaching is not the way learners acquire grammatical competence, instead they need to be exposed to the most common features of the target language to unconsciously acquire these patters. On the other hand, it has been observed that it is not enough to expose learners to the target language, they also need explicit instruction. Some grammar proponents argue that we must teach grammar because accuracy is so important. Regarding to this, there are different opinions if accuracy is important, I think it is.
Students’ interaction enables truly communication embracing meaningful input and output which is essential to develop lexical and grammatical competence. Kern & Warschauer (2000) explored the use of computer networks and its relation with language learning. Pellettieri (2000) claimed that NBC (synchronous network-based communication) activities have the same potential as oral communication does for the development of grammatical competence. To this regard we as teachers might want to try an online chatting letting our students to have a genuinely interaction with other students in a different part of the world. In my own opinion, it would have many advantages because the participants being motivated to interact might pay attention to the model form enhancing their grammatical competence in L2.
Summarizing, to be competent in a second language we need an array of skills and abilities. The main aim is to develop communicative competence, to do so we must build mainly lexical and grammatical competence to be able to express ourselves in an appropriate way. Interaction is one of the best ways to enforce the communication abilities gaining control over the language patterns and lexical items. Explicit instruction complements this strategy since it is important to be aware of specific rules of the language that we might not notice without an explanation.
REFERENCES:
· Jill Pellettieri (2000), Negotiation in cyberspace: The role of chatting in the development of grammatical competence. Retrieved at: http://mitki2.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/synchronous-online-chat-and-grammatical-competence/
· On-line chatting and the development of grammatical competence. Retrieved at: http://www.celea.org.cn/pastversion/lw/pdf/ZhaoYing_chenhong%A3%A9.pdf
· Should we teach grammar? Retrieved at: http://english.uncc.edu/linguistics/courses/6163/should_we_teach_grammar.htm
· HYMES, Dell. “On Communicative Competence” in Sociolinguistics, J.B. Pride and J. Homes. 1973. Ed. Harmonds worth: Penguin.
· CANALE, M SWAIN, M. “Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing.” 1980. Applied Linguistics.
