Phraseology in the foreign language classroom. Mission impossible?

Abstract

This article presents a different perspective on the learning and teaching of the phraseology in the foreign language class. Considering the holistic nature of language, we conceive phraseological units as completely common and inherent elements in verbal communication; that is why we cannot exclude them from the acquisition of the communicative competence. In this process we propose as a starting point the phraseology for developing the different parts of communicative competence. Thus, it is essential to look into the phraseological meaning, its configuration and its working. As we explain in this article, phraseological meaning is conformed by several informational chunks articulated in two levels, the semantic and the pragmatic. These considerations have interesting teaching implications