A pedagogical proposal to enhance the use of Linking Words in order to improve students' discourse competence

Abstract

Linking words are extremely important linguistic items which help to make the connections between sentences and utterances clear and to integrate and establish relations within a whole text. As such, they are essential devices to create complete texts as well as to ease the conversation flow. Thus, they are directly linked with the speakers' discourse competence and they are key elements to be taught and learnt by our students if we want them to become competent users of a language. This paper is aimed at presenting a pedagogical proposal to teach linking words and to improve and develop their knowledge regarding their effective use and functioning on the part of students. In order to do that, first of all, a preliminary study was carried out by means of observing three different aspects: the students' textbook, a set of written samples, and a questionnaire. The aim was to analyse the students' pre-instruction use of these linking devices considering the established parameters, and to identify their needs and perceptions. After that, from the results obtained, a didactic unit theoretically grounded on “modified inductive learning” and the development of the “communicative-discursive competence” was designed and implemented in order to obtain further results and to draw conclusions about the possible effectiveness of the didactic unit proposed and introduced. Finally, the results of the students' post-unit (post-instruction) writings were firstly analysed by following the same parameters previously applied to the pre-unit (pre-instruction) written samples, and then, compared to the ones obtained in the preliminary study in order to test the efficiency of the didactic unit designed and its implementation. In sum, results suggest that the teaching-learning proposal on linking words was useful and helpful for the students, since their knowledge of linking words seemed to improve and they were able to integrate different categories, and a wider variety of linking words correctly used in their discourse.