Pride and Powerlessness: Exploring Second Language Selection in Poland
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PRIDE AND POWERLESSNESS: EXPLORING SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION IN POLAND Leanne Marie Cameron B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 2006 THESIS Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in TEACHING ENGLISH TO SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO SPRING 2010 © 2010 Leanne Marie Cameron ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii PRIDE AND POWERLESSNESS: EXPLORING SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION IN POLAND A Thesis by Leanne Marie Cameron Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Dr. John T. Clark __________________________________, Second Reader Dr. Julian Heather ____________________________ Date iii Student: Leanne Marie Cameron I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. __________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________ Dr. Julian Heather TESOL Date Department of English iv Abstract of PRIDE AND POWERLESSNESS: EXPLORING SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION IN POLAND by Leanne Marie Cameron In the past two hundred years, Poland twice labored under the brutal occupation of its stronger, militaristic neighbors, promoting anti-German and anti-Russian sentiment still visible today. This research study inquires as to whether these attitudes have any impact on the language selection of Polish university students. During November and December of 2009, four undergraduate English pedagogy students at a mid-level Polish university were interviewed in order to ascertain their attitudes toward the languages that they studied, the motivation for studying these languages, and the role of social pressure in becoming competent in English, German, or Russian. The results suggest that the subjects viewed English as a neutral, prestige language unconnected to a specific culture, be it American or British. In word, they expressed a similarly neutral attitude toward German and Russian, though further analysis of their attitudes, contrasted with their actions, demonstrated that the social and historical influence of anti-German and anti- Russian sentiment may still play a role in their motivational processes. Further, this study also considers that the seeming negativity toward these second languages results from lack of choice in language selection and considers the future impact of this lack of choice on the subjects' language future. _______________________, Committee Chair Dr. John T. Clark _______________________ Date v DEDICATION For my parents - without you, I would be nowhere. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you so very much (i bardzo dzi!kuj!) to Dr. John T. Clark, Dr. Julian Heather, Dr. Anna Slo!, Dr. W"odzimierz Bartóg, and Dr. Eva Piotrowska-Oberda at Jan Kochanowski University, the U.S.-Polish Fulbright Commission, Dr. Monica Freeman, Dr. Mi-Suk Seo, my parents for catching my many errors, and my UJK students for their patience and help. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Dedication................................................................................................................................ vi Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................. vii List of Tables ........................................................................................................................... ix Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 Purpose ....................................................................................................................... 6 2. POLISH HISTORY, 966-1795........................................................................................... 9 3. POLISH HISTORY, 1795-1939....................................................................................... 22 4. POLISH HISTORY, 1939-PRESENT ............................................................................. 32 5. LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM.............................................................................. 50 6. ATTITUDE AND MOTIVATION IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING................ 64 7. SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION ............................................................................ 81 Methodology.............................................................................................................. 87 Research Questions.................................................................................................... 89 8. PRESENTATION OF THE DATA.................................................................................. 90 9. FINDINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS....................................................................... 109 References............................................................................................................................. 149 viii LIST OF TABLES Page 1. Table 1: Students' Basic Information......................................................................... 94 ix 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION The Polish Experience "You must carry into the future the whole experience that is 'Poland.' It is a difficult experience, perhaps the most difficult in the world, in Europe, in the Church." -Pope John Paul II (Bloch, 1982, p. 1) In autumn of 1939, “Poland,” a country frequently condemned to quotations as a thousand years of history has seen her name scrawled and erased and scrawled and erased again from the map of Europe, existed only historically, chopped and divided between the German Third Reich war machine and the grizzled power of the Soviet Union. Young Ryszard Kapu!ci"ski, who would grow to become the Polish-Lithuanian journalist whose own fragmented identity mirrored the state of his homeland and whose little town would later be incorporated into the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, came to school to find new textbooks, something Soviet and Cyrillic, replacing the Roman orthography of his native Polish. His teacher, who he would later bid farewell to through the slats of a cattle car bound for one of the camps that was responsible for the death of an estimated 5,384,000 Jewish and non-Jewish Poles (Lukas, 1986, p. 39), sorrowfully announced that the children would be learning a new language—and a new alphabet. He began with the first letter of the Cyrillic alphabet: S. The children glanced incredulously at their teacher 2 and one protested the abnormality of an alphabet that would start with S. Instead of offering an explanation, the teacher pointed to the title of their new textbook: they were to follow the Soviet Bible of Voprosy Leninizma, Studies in Leninism, penned by Stalin himself (Kapu!ci"ski, 1995). Even the Cyrillic alphabet had capitulated to Stalin’s power. The twenty years of the Second Republic ended, and free state of Poland had fallen. By 1939, most of the country would agree that the Polish experience, indeed, had been and would continue to be a difficult one. A brief review of Polish history is best described with a parade of bleak adjectives, fronted by Davies’ (2005a) classification of her history as both “terrible and pathetic” (p. xi). Since Poland’s incarnation in 966, the nation has seen five separate eras in which it was invaded by stronger outside forces and denied self-rule, in 1138, 1795, 1813, 1864, and 1939, though arguably the last hundred years have been the most brutal and tumultuous in a thousand years of Polish civilization. The past twenty years of self rule as the Third Republic, declared independent in 1990, have not yet erased the past atrocities and the scars of Nazi brutality and Soviet propaganda that still cripple the nation, despite an upturn in the economy and the 2004 entrance into the European Union (Ch#opicki, 2003). Today, the historic section of Warsaw betrays the naïve tourist with its old-world charm, with winding cobbled streets that open onto café-laden squares where perogi (dumplings) and the finest Polish beers abound. Only postcards, hawked next to Baltic amber pendants and hand-whittled chess pieces, divulge the past. Pictures of a contemporary Stare Miasto (Old Town), with elaborate peacock scrollwork painted down 3 the sides of row houses, sit next to grainy black-and-white shots that show the city as it was at the end of World War II: almost entirely destroyed, the city was reduced to three feet of rubble in most places and lost nearly 200,000 of the inhabitants to warfare, starvation, or outright extermination (Davies, 2005b, p. 355; Lukas, 1986). But almost all evidence of Nazi destruction has been erased and the cement jungle of brutalist architecture that is the new city bears witness to sixty years of Soviet influence. The looming skyscrapers are haphazardly scattered around the city, divided by wide streets that were built, some say, to allow for tank movements in case of insurrection. New Warsaw, like many other cities throughout the ex-Soviet Bloc, exhibits the color palate of Gorbachev grays and Brezhnev browns, weathered with acid rain and seeping rust stains, a sharp contrast to the cheery saffron yellow and rose pink of the old square, Rynek Starego Miasta. Almost three hundred kilometers south of Warsaw, near the sleepy town of O!wi$cim, Auschwitz-Birkenau stands to this day as a massive field encased in a pen of towering barbed-wire fences. From high above the ground, in a command tower once manned by machine guns, the entire camp appears below as a graveyard, the