DEVELOPING PHRASEOLOGICAL COMPETENCE IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNERS

“Idioms are transparent to native speakers, but
a course of perplexity to those who are acquiring
a second language.”
(Johnson-Laird 1993)

This paper arises as the result of the project " Supplemental Instruction as a Tool for Improving Students’ Language Competence at the Faculty of Philology". Students who enroll in the first year at the Faculty of Philology in Stip come with various language competences they have developed or acquired during their education so far and whom we will try to direct towards overcoming difficulties, i.e. obstacles occurring during their course by means of this project for supplemental classes in the subjects contemporary Macedonian / English / German language. The project is planned to be implemented in two phases - in the first and the second semester. The paper is related to the supplemental classes organized in the second semester when Group A will be the control group, while Group B will be the experimental group. Group A will not have additional classes, and in group B implicit learning of the language will be implemented through the use of literary texts, amongst others and with phraseological units according to the principles of the language approach in the use of literary texts. At the beginning of the second semester, the participants are expected to take a test for determining the level of their phraseological competence, and, at the end of the same semester, re-testing of the same participants who visited the supplemental classes through which they were developing phraseological competence will be carried out in order to determine the benefits from this approach to students’ language competence.

We expect the summarized results to confirm our thesis that the achievements in the development of students' phraseological competence are of great importance for improving their overall language competence. The goal of the project is to improve students’ language competences through organized supplemental classes, but in our paper we emphasize the phraseological competence as one of the important elements of the writing and the spoken language competence, because the development of phraseological competence is being developed simultaneously with language competence, they develop side by side. Therefore, our goal is to enable students to: "Phraseologism entdecken - entschlüsseln - festigen - verwenden".