6533b86ffe1ef96bd12ce5b4

RESEARCH PRODUCT

“English Self-Taught”: Self-Study Guides for Polish Learners of English (1860–1945)

subject

description

The history of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) has been relatively well described in specialist literature, yet the beginnings of EFL teaching to Poles have not received much scholarly attention. One of the consequences of this state of research is that a proportion of pre-1945 EFL textbooks aimed at native speakers of Polish remain unknown. The present paper seeks to shed some light on self-study books, popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century materials intended for self-instruction; relatively cheap and aimed at the mass market, they claimed to offer effective ways of teaching foreign language skills in a short period of time. I will analyze five selected books belonging to this genre, discussing in some detail their structure and content. In doing so, I want to find out what language material they included and how it was presented, what teaching/learning method they applied, and whether the popularity of the resources was well deserved. It should be kept in mind; however, that self-instruction is intricately individual and depends on a range of factors. As they are hard to determine in a textbook-oriented study, one can only speculate about the actual shape of the teaching/learning process.