Development of the oral strategic competence in Spanish as a second language through service-learning in the Mexingtonian Bluegrass

Abstract

Communicative competence is understood as the ability people have, in order to achieve communication effectively both in their first and the second language. The development of this skill by language learners has been of interest to researchers of second language acquisition. For their ability to be considered linguistically appropriate, the speakers need to have the command of the grammatical, sociolinguistic, discursive, and strategic competences. Whilst thus far these components have been analyzed in several learning scenarios, a lack of attention to the service-learning context has been noticed. Consequently, this study attempts to add knowledge to this line of research, by focusing on the development of the oral strategic competence in the learning of Spanish as a second language in an educational setting that combines the core curriculum and the community service in higher education.