0000000000160979
AUTHOR
Liliana Piasecka
Blending Literature and Foreign Language Learning: Current Approaches
The aim of this chapter is to discuss the place of literature in foreign language learning and teaching contexts, and to show reasons of using literary texts for the development of communicative competence, intercultural communicative competence, and for individual as well as social human growth. Although literature and language teaching had been following separate paths, currently a strong tendency emerges of integrating language and literature teaching across proficiency levels. This tendency results from the recognition of the roles that literacy, multiliteracies and multimodality play in the life of humans in the 21st century. Respected bodies such as the Council of Europe or Modern Lan…
Sensitizing Foreign Language Learners to Cultural Diversity Through Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence
Language and culture are intricately interwoven thus teaching and learning a language inevitabely involves teaching and learning culture of its users. However, this always raises a question about which culture is involved, how the concept is understood and what it means for foreign language learners as well as for native speakers of the language involved. Culture is not monolithic, it comprises a variety of cultural practices that people engage in across a range of social configurations they participate in. The present chapter addresses current concepts of culture in the context of foreign/second language learning, discusses how they relate to foreign language teaching practices (as illustr…
Effective Teacher Training: Teacher Lectures in Comparison with Student Power Point Presentations
National (dispositions of the Ministry of Education in Poland 2004, 2006) and international (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages 2001) documents provide many guidelines and suggestions about the competencies that foreign language teachers of today should develop to meet the desired standards and obtain the necessary qualifications. These qualifications comprise knowledge and a wide range of skills. The focus of this chapter is on knowledge since it is the foundation for the development of teaching skills and of a reflective approach to one’s teaching practices. In Polish tertiary education institutions the so-called “theoretical knowledge” has been imparted by means of lect…
New media and perennial problems in foreign language learning and teaching
The book concerns the ways in which the new media shape communication along with educational expectations and practices in foreign language classrooms. Although foreign language learners have cheap and easy access to information and ways of communication, they also wrestle with problems that have always accompanied language learning. The focus of the book is two-fold. On the one hand, the authors demonstrate how using social networks, videoconferencing, mobile phones, wikis, and computer-mediated interaction contributes to the development of language skills, negotiated interaction, autonomy, and intercultural competence. On the other, they discuss “old” issues pertaining to the role of voca…
What Does it Feel Like to Use English? Empirical Evidence from EFL Students
Recent studies concerning foreign language learning and teaching do not focus exclusively on the cognitive processes of the parties involved, but also on their emotional states, which are intricately interwoven with language learning and use. To date, many researchers have focused on the effects of language anxiety on the learners’ development of communicative competence. However, apart from anxiety, humans experience a wide range of other emotions that foreign/second language use evokes across many learning and communicative contexts. Research on affect in foreign language learning has been growing steadily and has been concerned not only with foreign language anxiety, but also with positi…
Teaching Matters: Enjoyment and Job Satisfaction
Teaching occurs in a complex and dynamic environment that involves other people—learners, their families and school authorities as well as the subject matter to be taught. Expectations towards the effects of teaching are high, though opinions about teachers may be harmful. What is a contemporary teacher like, then? The aim of this article is to present a portrait of an average teacher on the basis of selected empirical evidence from TALIS 2013 survey (OECD, 2014). Also teachers’ emotions and their relations with job satisfaction and overall success are discussed. Finally, empirical evidence from a case study on job satisfaction, enjoyment and success of Polish teachers of English is discuss…
Activating Character Strengths Through Poetic Encounters in a Foreign Language—A Case Study
The paper brings together two important issues related to effective functioning of foreign/second language learners, that is character strengths (one of the pillars of positive psychology) and the use of literary texts for language learning. The goals of using literary texts in a foreign/second language learning contexts and the goals of positive psychology converge. Both literature and positive psychology aim at enriching and expanding individual and social functioning and so they contribute to satisfaction and flourishing. The case study reported in the paper aimed at finding the participants’ opinions about the role of literary texts in foreign language learning and checking whether work…
Tinker, Tailor…: Creativity in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching
The word creativity has recently won great popularity in numerous contexts, showing both positive (“creative writing”) and negative (“creative accounting”) connotations. The concept itself has many meanings as it may refer to the end product of one’s activity, the cognitive processes involved in the creative act, the personality of a creative person, the development of creativity across the life span, and also the factors that either stimulate or inhibit the process of creation (Łukasik, 2015; Simonton, 2000). There is also a distinction between exceptional creativity, manifesting itself in important works that are significant for a given society, and everyday creativity, which can be obser…
Teachers’ Use of Internet Resources for Preparing English Lessons
The twenty-first century is unquestionably the age of the Internet, which is an inexhaustible source of information instantly available. Multimodal texts obtained via the Internet, cheap, authentic and varied, may be successfully used in the process of teaching foreign languages. The paper presents the results of a survey which aimed at diagnosing if and how teachers of English as a foreign language use Internet resources in their teaching. The results reveal that almost all the respondents, young of age and of teaching experience, are skilled Internet users who strongly rely on this resource also in their professional activity. They use the Internet to find teaching materials that suppleme…
Putting Bits and Pieces Together: Awareness of Text Structure in Jigsaw Reading
Issues concerning Language Awareness have been debated for about 40 years (Hawkins 1999) and have brought about many interesting developments in the area of language teaching and learning. In the following text, the official definition and scope of language awareness studies are briefly presented. Then, language awareness within the framework of foreign text comprehension—a crossroad where different types of knowledge, linguistic and non-linguistic, and a variety of cognitive processes meet and interact—is discussed. Since text comprehension is such a complex process, it requires the readers to use various forms of language awareness. The study reported in the second part of the paper was d…
Foreign Language Students’ Perceptions of Their Identity
Foreign language learning innvolves cognitive, affective and social functioning of the persons involved in this experience. As a social practice, it is also related to the learners’ perceptions of their identity, specifically to their language identity which refers to the relationship between one’s sense of self and the language used to communicate. This implies that using a system of communication, the speaker develops a new sense of self that remains in a dynamic relation with other senses of self, based on (an)other language(s) the person knows.Language learners’ identity is no longer defined as fixed and stable but as “complex, contradictory and multifaceted” (Norton 1997, p. 419). It i…