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THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE COMPETENCE FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE METASYSTEM APPROACH. Education & Pedagogy Journal. 2023;3(7):52-67. DOI:

The article analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the existing approaches to defining the concept of linguistic competence. A proposed classification organizes the variety of competencies associated with language use. The author’s conception of the organization of linguistic competence at the structural level as a psychological and pedagogical phenomenon is presented from the theoretical and methodological positions of the Metasystematic approach as the most modern version of the systematic approach to date. Five levels of the system of linguistic competence were identified: Metasystem, System-wide, Subsystem, Component, and Elementary. It is stated that the content of the highest metasystem level of linguistic competence is a holistic linguistic ability consisting of communicative, lexical-semantic, grammatical, and regulatory subsystems. The regulatory system is most important to the functioning of linguistic competence, which is an activity invariant of the self-regulatory processes of goal formation, prediction, decision-making, planning, programming, control, and self-control. The embedding of the level of the metasystem in the underlying levels of the system determines the specifics of its content, which is represented by different ways of dealing with language knowledge: Language Reflection, Language Intuition, Language Knowledge, and Language Skills. In order to verify the model of the structural level of language competence, an empirical study was conducted with a sample of 94 second-grade students of a general education school. The methods used were tests of language and speech development, which are widely used in psychological and pedagogical practice, and the method developed by the author to study the peculiarities of a student’s language awareness when working with quasi-linguistic constructions. The methods of interview, structured observation, and expert assessment were used. The study confirms the validity of the authors’ theoretical ideas. The obtained theoretical and empirical results can be used to clarify the goals, purposes, and methods of language teaching and psychological and pedagogical support of this process at all levels of language teaching.

Keywords: linguistic competence, language knowledge, language intuition, language reflection, systematic approach, metasystematic approach, language learning