On developing language subcompetence in cadets of educational organizations of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs: Foreign language learning

Abstract

The development of foreign language professional communicative competence is based on improving the students’ language subcompetence since only with the automated language skills it is possible to move on to the types of speech activity with the concomitant development of communication skills. Given the variety of forms of organizing students’ educational activities, aimed at mastering their lexical and grammatical skills in the formulation of utterances, it is important to solve the problem of a systematic approach to the implementation of tasks. In this regard, the main goal of the article is to develop a consistent model for improving the lexical and grammatical skills in cadets of educational organizations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia based on a specific type of the task. To this end, the article elicits the possibilities of developing a series of tasks in the format of lexical and grammatical transformations to improve language subcompetence as a constitutive part of foreign language professional communicative competence.The proposed system of tasks for improving lexical and grammatical skills is built on the principle of growing complication: from one-component grammatical transformations, which are aimed at practising one specific skill on the studied lexical material without restrictions of thematic repertoire, to multicomponent lexical grammatical transformations.The range of tasks includes grammatical transformations of the active voice patterns into the passive voice ones, the use of modal verbs and their equivalents to convey the given modal meanings with attention to the use of infinitive forms, the reconstruction of syndetic conditionals into asyndetic ones, the transformation of compound sentences into sentences complicated by predicative constructions and vice versa.Within the framework of the lexical skills development, we illustrate the transformations requiring the use of synonyms or synonymous phrases, antonyms (taking into account phrasal verbs, which represent a separate lexical group), as well as substitutions, taking into account the collocation properties of lexemes and different degrees of idiomaticity inherent in complex nominative units.Consistent and regular use of transformations is one of the effective ways to form a mechanism of equivalent substitutions.