Enhancing Language Skills: Practical Exercises for Students

Language Acquisition and Development in Children

Children can acquire language very quickly, including both oral and written codes. Grammatical work should be based on discovering how language works by examining phrases and texts. This may include activities that require comparing, relating, classifying, segmenting, etc., similar to the processes involved in text production.

Parsing and Syntactical Analysis

Parsing is a traditional exercise in language classes. We can perform syntactic analysis in the classroom, but only to the extent appropriate and at suitable levels. Morphosyntactic observation and analysis should be performed on student language usage so that intuitive and weak expression becomes a full and thoughtful command of the language. The mechanisms of analysis only make sense when applied to the improvement of expression. Four graphical systems have been used in different periods. All four can be useful, depending on the objective of the activity:

• Traditional methods (underlined)
• The inverted tree
• Hockett's boxes
• Analysis of law

Constructing Phrases: Practical Exercises

The most important language skill students need to develop is practicing sentence production. We will present some morphosyntax exercises especially suitable for active and practical sentence construction work.

Exercises

1. Connect Phrases: This can be done in two columns. The student will connect phrases from the left column with an arrow to form a sentence when united with those on the right. The resulting sentences can then be written.
2. Dress the Sentence: This involves adding a certain number of adjectives or adjectival phrases to a basic sentence.
3. Change the Category of Words in the Sentence: This involves building a new phrase from the headline of a story, changing the grammatical category of a word.
4. Trace the Phrase: This involves writing new sentences that have the same syntactic structure and the same number of words, but with a different theme.
5. Enlarge the Phrase: Starting with a subject, a verb, and a complement, information is added to each item to expand the sentence, making it more complex.
6. Undo the Phrase: From a given sentence, a short paragraph is written, made up of short sentences that contain the same information.
7. Vary the Sentence: This involves rewriting the model sentence in as many ways as possible, keeping the same information.
8. Complete the Sentence: The necessary grammatical words are added to a list of nouns and verbs to form a coherent and correct sentence.
9. Order the Phrase: The different components of a disordered sentence are sorted correctly.
10. Change from Direct to Indirect Speech: A sentence is changed from direct to indirect speech, and vice versa, with all necessary grammatical changes.
11. Adding Phrases, Improving the Sentence, Phrase Pruning, and Scoring

Evaluation of Communication Skills

The global assessment of communication skills requires assessing each part to determine a student's strengths and weaknesses. Neglecting certain aspects can lead to a distorted and incomplete diagnosis, providing unreliable data. This is particularly dangerous in areas such as morphosyntax or spelling, which deserve special interest from teachers, along with personal training and motivation. These areas also have an important tradition in testing. Galí proposed a 23-point measure of syntactic ability and assessment: Students prepare an essay that consists of writing a description of an engraving. When evaluating, the teacher assigns a number to each phrase, corresponding to the type of syntactic construction, according to the established guidelines. Finally, the number of sentences and the length of the text in words are counted, and a formula is applied to obtain an overall assessment.