CHOSEN SOCIOLINGUISTIC COMPETENCIES IN STUDENTS IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

Abstract

In this paper, we are concerned with one of the factors of intercultural communicative competence – sociolinguistic competence. First, we lay theoretical background for our research, explain the underlying methodology and after conducting the research, we analyse the data. Because we acquired the data from three different sources of the same information, we also explained the relations among them. Our research sample are students from 2.A from Golianove Gymnázium in Nitra and their teachers. This is a class which has more English lessons than usual and a native teacher. We created semi-structured interviews, based on two documents: The Council of Europe’s CEFR (2001) and Reid’s “Communicative competence connected with culture” (In Reid, 2014: 64). In our research results, we learnt that the students have very good socio-linguistic competence as they identified several examples to each of the chosen categories (greetings, titles and addressing, accents and dialects and colloquialisms, slangs and dialectisms). Every student interviewee also uses different multimedia on daily basis and the majority students state, that they consider being the main source of their socio-linguistic competence the multimedia. However, even though the relations between the specific phrases were not found within some categories (slang words and colloquialisms), teachers claim to have implemented activities that focus on these categories of socio-linguistic competence. To precisely identify the source of the students’ socio-linguistic competence, further research would be necessary.