Teaching Foreign Language Writing Skills and Stimulating the Development of Linguistic Competence in Grammar and Lexis

Abstract

This article describes the process of learning foreign language writing skills, aimed not only at the active acquisition of text models characteristic of a given linguo-cultural community or at the activation of linguistic structures, but also at the development of lexical and grammatical competence. The approach described consists of identifying the actual needs of the students as a basis for boosting their writing skills. The initial assumption was that analysing the language component of texts written in a foreign language allowed for the identification of the problems their authors experienced when learning the lexical and grammatical system of the language in question, not only in terms of correctness but also of the diversity of vocabulary and structures used. This model uses written texts as tools to stimulate the linguistic aspect. Text-based activities in this model include an array of transformation tasks aimed at perfecting the language and style of the text by, among others, activating passively acquired lexis and grammatical structures. The effectiveness of the approach presented in the article was tested in a classroom teaching Polish as a foreign language.