Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar for English Communicative Competence and Translation

This paper discusses problems with conventional vocabulary and grammar teaching methods, which focus on the sound and meaning of words and the five sentence patterns based on T. C. Onions’s five predicate forms. English learners who study English vocabulary and these sentence patterns often struggle with writing and speaking in English, frequently making errors because they rarely learn how to combine words correctly. To address these problems and improve learners’ English communicative competence it is necessary for them to learn vocabulary and sentence formation in a systematic and principled way. In this paper it is suggested that teachers adopt a generative approach to teaching English words and sentence structures, applying Chomsky’s theory of subcategorization and selectional properties. In this approach, teachers instruct learners on predicates, such as verbs and adjectives, taking into account their subcategorization frames and selectional properties. This method will enable learners to understand how predicates merge with their complements to form grammatically correct sentences, allowing them to construct sentences accurately using predicates.