ENHANCING COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE: THE ROLE OF COLLOCATIONS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRAMS

The role of collocations in advancing communicative competence among language faculty students is crucial for effective second language learning. Vocabulary acquisition, specifically through collocations, plays an essential role in language proficiency, expanding students' expressive capabilities, increasing fluency, and ensuring more precise communication. While traditional language teaching is often focused on grammatical competence, recent theories emphasize the importance of vocabulary, particularly collocations and lexical chunks, in mastering a foreign language. Numerous scholars highlight the significance of collocations in developing communicative competence, arguing that language is best understood as a “grammaticalized vocabulary”. Such expressions allow learners to better understand language patterns and function as key components of fluency. This article explores how collocations may contribute to lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic competence of language learners. It examines methods and strategies for teaching such word combinations, including contextual learning, interactive tasks, and comparative analysis, which help students acquire more natural and effective communication skills. The study underscores the need for modern language instruction methodologies to integrate the teaching of combinations, as they enhance students' overall communicative competence and linguistic performance.