LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC COMPETENCE OF COLLEGE FRESHMAN STUDENTS IN A PHILIPPINE STATE UNIVERSITY
Enhancing English academic performance has been identified as a requisite in the modern world in order to be globally competitive. Students and teachers should exert more effort to improve communicative competence. Improving lexical and syntactic competence is one way of helping students develop their linguistic competence. This is a descriptive study administered to 200 students determined the level of students’ lexical and syntactic skills in order to provide necessary measures and needs to improve their communicative competence. Data were analyzed using frequency tally and percentages. Based on the result, it is manifested that majority of first year college students are not competent in the lexical aspects particularly in using the correct idioms, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms and affixes in the sentence. In the syntactic aspect, the students could not identify the correct subject-verb agreement in the sentence, and could not use the correct adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and prepositions in the sentence. The study showed that majority of first year college students have very low performance in lexical and syntactic aspects. This results indicates that the areas on lexical and syntactic aspects are really difficult to understand by the learners. As revealed, only the College of Education students are very highly competent followed by the college of Arts and Sciences who are highly competent. The rest of the students in the different colleges needs more effort in enhancing their knowledge and skills in lexicon and syntax specially the students of College of Computer Studies and Information Technology. After analyzing the result it is recommended that students should be exposed to varied learning materials, exposed to varied appropriate tasks, should be updated with current trends, faculty enhance pedagogical emphasis and concerned officials must review admission policy of the university.
Lexical Competence, Syntactic Competence, Communicative Competence, Linguistic Development, English academic performance