Abstract:

The paper considers such an important and beneficial phenomenon as language intuition that is an integral part of language competence or skills. It aims at answering the question whether language intuition is an in-born gift or a skill that can be obtained and mastered. Using quantitative and qualitative competitive analyses of the students’ academic achievements in the institute, the authors form an opinion about the importance and necessity of this competence for an efficient teaching and studying process basing on the idea that language intuition is a part of language skills that interact and influence one another. Intuition in general and language intuition in particular are connected with unconscious forms of psychological activity and intellect. Taking into account the long-standing experience and observations as well as the up-to-date trends in teaching, the authors draw conclusions and give recommendations the aim of which is to develop language intuition in order to make the teaching process of a foreign language more interesting, personalized and efficient. A marvelous combination of language intuition and the gained knowledge of a language results in a language proficiency.

Keywords:

Language/linguistic intuition, linguistic feeling, language competence/skills, psycholinguistics, language practice, introspection.