Linguistic skills and grammatical knowledge of the CCH Vallejo students

Abstract

This research was done to analyze the linguistic skills (particularly, the written production) and the grammatical knowledge of the ‘CCH Vallejo’ students, without disregarding the perspective nor the students’ profile, to reflect about the impact of the grammar domain in written expression and, specially, to have a precedent that allows developing solutions which benefits both the student and the academic community. A qualitative methodology was used, applying some techniques, such as the analysis of written documents, the participant observation, the interview, and a test of grammatical knowledge. The designed instruments were executed to 11 ‘CCH Vallejo’ students, who were observed for one school year, whence the analysis of the registers is also longitudinal.
Essentially, it was found that, at the beginning of the course, the students’ written production was distinguished by having simple syntactic constructions; besides several grammatical errors, including the wrong use of punctuation marks (most of the students made use of commas and periods), the spelling errors, the accentuation issues, poor vocabulary, language vices and the indiscriminate use of the grammatical person. Although at the end of the school year, most of the errors were still present, a syntactic maturity was observed in the informants’ written production, mostly in the ones with a better grammar knowledge, in the sense that they started to apply more complex syntactic structures and elaborating more mature texts, with lexical richness, and other punctuation marks, like dashes and parentheses. In regards to the informants’ grammatical expertise, it was noticed that, despite not being deficient, most lack basic grammar knowledge that was supposed to be gathered in previous educational stages, and that are vital to improve the written production, such as the grammatical categories and the syntactic functions. In conclusion, there is an existing correlation between the grammar knowledge and the written production domain.