2006 No. 4 SUMMARIES Andrzej Bogusławski PEDAGOGICAL
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“Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny” 2006 No. 4 SUMMARIES Andrzej Bogusławski PEDAGOGICAL PARADOXES OF LINGUISTICS Summary The author reflects on the question of what in the results of broadly understood investigations of language may be particularly weighty in pedagogical activities. The point of departure in this reflection is a definition of science (as activity). The definition reads: science is a systematic, publicly relevant cognitive valuation of expressions. From the standpoint of this definition any research whose object is language is ensured recognition as valid part of science. The „pedagogical paradox” of linguistics lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of what is being done in linguistic research does not have a really substantial and indispensable place in justifiably important pedagogical activities. Apart from pathological cases, everyone is in full command of their mother tongue. Polish is very uniform, so there is no question of evening up regional differences in speech. Linguistic theories are also of little value where undeniable advantages can be pursued, such as those deriving from exercises in higher, e.g. rhetorical, areas of language use. Advantages in general education offered by science of language are questionable because theories of language as well as theoretical grammatical works either present knowledge a priori which people are in possession of anyway or are far from being mature. Linguistics can find its most effective public justification in offering assistance to the process of practical acquisition of foreign languages which really affects the masses. The author illustrates this claim with the example of teaching the Russian language. Key words: pedagogy, science, linguistics, language, foreign language acquisition. Hanna Komorowska LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING Summary The article contains a review of approaches to the teaching of culture in language pedagogy as well as reflections on aspects of culture included in various foreign language teaching methods. New trends in the educational policy of the Council of Europe and the European Union are also presented, special emphasis being given to the concepts of sociocultural knowledge and intercultural competence. The author discusses the role of intercultural competence in the teaching of the so-called international languages vs. the so-called non-international foreign languages as well as the place of culture in foreign language instruction provided for a variety of communicative purposes. Against this background curricular documents and teaching materials are then analysed, including their reflection in the practice of language teaching. The author presents conclusions for language policy and implications for future research. Key words: foreign language teaching, language and culture, lingua franca, intercultural competence, European language policy, FLT coursebooks. Teresa Giermak-Zielińska LANGUAGE, CULTURE, TRANSLATION STUDIES Summary This paper is primarily concerned with French studies. As evident from the sociological research carried out in Poland in 2004, graduates of French departments in the years 2000– 2003 have found employment as language teachers, relatively few have become translators but the combination of both of these professional activities is frequent. Language studies do not address the specific needs of the translation profession, they do provide, however, considerable knowledge of French literature, culture and language. It is important that the acquired expertise should then be applied to specific translation tasks. The paper discusses, by way of example, the course in translating Old French texts, offered by the author to students of French over a couple of years. The course sought to accomplish a threefold aim: to familiarize the students, using practice based teaching, with a number of important concepts from the field of translation theory, to make students sensitive to the role of cultural elements and to look for translation equivalents expressed in good, standard Polish. That is so because the single biggest difficulty for students is not comprehending the original text, notwithstanding its specific syntax and lexicon, but the selection of appropriate lexical and syntactic means in Polish. Key words: French studies, translation, Old French, Polish, cultural differences, equivalence. Magdalena Danielewiczowa AL THAT LEXICOGRLAPHY Summary This paper presents selected problems of contemporary unilingual lexicography. The author claims that lexicography is one of the few linguistic domains of interest to ordinary users of language. Dictionaries reflect the common knowledge, the world view and life philosophy of a given language community. They are an inexhaustible source of information on a given collective consciousness. Among correctly delimited and registered lexical units, one can locate items which define the social identity and draw distinctions between given cultures. The pedagogical task of familiarizing students with advanced modern lexicography is by no means an easy one. Questions on how to delimit lexical units or how to adequately describe their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties are extremely complex. The author illustrates these difficulties by analysing the two Polish expressions: ten cały_ and cały ten_. She points out that definitions of the meaning of expressions in natural language result from a number of interpretive techniques, the most important of which is analysing the expressions in various semantically inconsistent sentences. The resulting lexicographic descriptions of the lexical items ten cały_ and cały ten_have been included in the paper. Key words: lexicography, lexical item, meaning, semantic definition. Jolanta Zając THE PRAGMATIC DIMENSION OF CONVERSATIONAL DISCOURSE AND ITS PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS Summary Contemporary foreign language teaching methodology relies heavily on the communicative function of language. This function indicates what meanings and linguistic forms will guide the learner towards maximally complete pragmatic competence in speech and writing. It is the former type which is my primary concern, as it is most commonly associated with everyday communication. Teaching speaking in a foreign language is far less intuitive today than it used to be thanks to psycholinguistic research and discourse analyses, which both explain the complex mechanisms of speech production and inspire pedagogic innovations. Speaking is motivated by and traceable to its original stimulus, while withdrawal may be motivated not only by ignorance but above all by various communicative anxieties which effectively hinder conversational efforts. A closer look at the nature of the communication process and a careful consideration of the communication units used in the production of speech enable a more efficient organization of communicative tasks, with due attention paid to their complexity and specificity. By drawing upon the research on conversational discourse and its pragmatic conditioning it becomes possible to improve communicative authenticity. This can be done by making our learners aware of and sensitive to certain communicative mechanisms which up to now tended to get lost in textbook materials and exercises with excessive “pedagogic orientation”. Key words: foreign langue teaching, conversational discourse, communication process, pragmatic competence in speech. Romuald Gozdawa-Gołębiowski TEACHING INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH: AN INTERCULTURAL OR ANTICULTURAL APPROACH? Summary This paper examines the uneasy relationship between language and culture in the foreign language teaching context. For the purposes of this discussion the denotation of the term culture has been reduced to four pedagogically relevant areas: culture as product, artefact, social norm and linguistic behaviour. Is cultural neutrality a possible and desirable alternative to any intercultural communicative approach (for example as proposed by Michael Byram and his followers)? While for the majority of natural languages this “anticultural crusade” seems entirely pointless, in the case of English there has been an exponentially growing number of non-native users (a billion in David Crystal’s estimate) who employ English to satisfy basic communicative needs rather than to demonstrate cultural identity. For this reason it is proposed that the so-called native-speaker norm be abandoned in teaching and testing international English. This implies: putting more stress on functional adequacy at the cost of grammatical correctness, resigning from the excessive testing of semantically and syntactically unpredictable formulaic patterns and idiosyncratic (non-rule-governed) grammatical constructions, and introducing cultural references from outside of the English- speaking countries. There is a clear need for a lot of further discussion about the role of culture and the driving forces behind it in language learning, not least because we are all witnessing the twin processes of de-nativization and internationalization of English. Key words: language, culture, interculturality, culture-neutral teaching, international English, cultural identity, native speaker, formulaicity. Piotr Stalmaszczyk GENERATIVE GRAMMAR IN SEARCH FOR THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE Summary The article discusses the developments in Chomskyan generative grammar, from the theory of Government and Binding to the more recent Minimalist Program, with special focus on the concept of language, grammar and Universal Grammar. Noam Chomsky distinguishes