ABSTRACTS

Bożena Czekańska-Mirek

Self-Presentation or Self-Reflection

The article aims to discuss self-presentation as one of the most important skills, its role in personal and professional communication. The author shares a reflection on the difficulties in building self-presentation by the representatives of generation Z and briefly describes them. Self-reflection is the first and the most important stage in building self-presentation. Suggestions for exercises are included to make it easier for the students to reflect on themselves and to encourage them to search for development.

Magdalena Jochimczyk

Working with Written Text as Part of an Interactive Learning Model

In a foreign language lesson, working with written text can support the implementation of an interactive educational model, both in school and academic teaching. Written texts, especially engaging stories, can be used as a material for conversation in the target language with other students and the teacher. Moreover, own written essays provide an opportunity for an authentic dialogue with the teacher during classes, because the conversation about them assumes the resignation from the directive-based classroom management by the teacher in favour of a free conversation with the students. A real dialogue that the students conduct with the academic teacher on the basis of prepared written texts presupposes equality of partners in the communication situation.

Jolanta Łącka-Badura

Immediacy Behaviors in Adult Foreign Language Teaching

The article focuses on the role that teachers’ immediacy behaviors (i.e. behaviors aimed at building the atmosphere of interpersonal closeness between teachers and learners) play in adult foreign language education. Based on the literature review as well as the author’s own experience and observations, the article presents the positive impact of teachers’ immediacy behaviors on the effectiveness of the teaching process and the benefits the behaviors bring for both learners and teachers. It also offers a large selection of examples, including linguistic, paralinguistic and non-linguistic behaviors that teachers can use and develop in order to build a positive atmosphere in foreign language courses.

Małgorzata Molska

Certificate of Proficiency in Foreign Languages and Formative Regulations

Certification of proficiency in foreign languages do not preclude formative regulations. The complementarity of many components of evaluation processes is an undeniable added value in the education process, which aims to find the answer to the question of how to use the value obtained in the evaluation process to improve our activities and ensure better development for all of its entities.

Sylwia Niewczas

The Benefits of Enhancing Peer Interaction in the Language Classroom

Oral interaction between learners is seen nowadays as a chance to participate in real communication in many foreign language classrooms. As educators, one of our roles is to create as favourable learning environment as possible in order to enable our students to increase their skills. This goal can be achieved by enhancing student–student interaction in the classroom. This article focuses on peer interaction and its benefits, as well as its practical implementations during language classess.

Paulina Oczko

Chinese Students and Teachers of Polish as a Foreign Language: Difficulties in Interaction

This article deals with the interactive discourse that plays an important role in the process of shaping communicative competence between a Chinese student and a teacher and/or teacher of Polish as a foreign language. The discussion focuses on the difficulties in interaction: teacher–student and student–student. The text presents the most frequent ways of activating students and methods of eliminating communication disorders. The problem lies not only in initiating interaction with the learner, but also in maintaining the established contact and giving the conversation a natural tone. Passive participation of Chinese students in classes may lead to a weak and rather slow acquisition of both the ability to ask questions and to read the meanings and intentions of the participant of the discourse.

Mirosław Pawlak

Language Error Correction as Part of Language Classroom Interaction

Error correction is an integral component of interaction in the language classroom. Despite heated debates, there is now a consensus that errors should be corrected, a position that finds theoretical, empirical and pedagogical support. This does not mean that all inaccurate utterances should always be corrected, as such intervention should be closely related to the target language forms taught and the aims of a class, and it should also be undertaken in a principled way. The article presents arguments for correction, but also argues that the way in which it is conducted should be adjusted to the type of language task performed, as well as offering guidelines as to how this should most effectively be done.

Ewa Piechurska-Kuciel

Job-Related Burnout of a Foreign Language Teacher

The teaching profession is characterized by constant emotional engagement accompanied by another factor augmenting the stress level – high social expectations. It follows that this occupation can be exceptionally sensitive to symptoms of job-related burnout. There are three basic mechanisms of this phenomenon: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and feelings of reduced personal accomplishment. According to the research that have been carried out so

far, the teaching profession is threatened by high levels of burnout. The foreign language teacher may be extremely susceptible to that syndrome, due to their work with learners whose identity fluctuated under the influence of the foreign language learning process. The worldwide empirical studies point to the fact that the burnout syndrome may affect young teachers who are single, with lower levels of teaching experience, and higher educational levels, who are dissatisfied with their salary.

Tomasz Róg

Optimising Oral Interactive Tasks

Last two decades have seen significant advances in research into oral interaction in the language classroom. Based on an increasingly better understanding of the role of input, interaction and linguistic production, contemporary SLA recommends the implementation of pair or group work during which learners have the opportunity to use their linguistic resources as authentically and productively as possible. Oral interaction denotes verbal behaviour between the teacher and their learners and between the learners. Classroom interaction may be seen not only as a language exercise, but can significantly contribute to language acquisition. This article discusses how foreign language teachers can control the conditions in which students perform oral interaction tasks in order to improve language acquisition.

Magdalena Sowa

Grammar as an Element of LSP Training

The grammatical competence is a component of communicative competence, but in practice the communication skills often prevail over language correctness. Nevertheless, the use of language subsystems in accordance with grammatical rules is the basis for precise and effective verbal communication, especially in a professional context, and may indicate the professionalism of the language user. This article is a reflection on the role of grammatical elements in professional communication and on the place of grammar in specialist language programs and effective ways of teaching it. The learner’s profile and his/her needs will be the starting points to discuss possible approaches to teaching grammar.

Agata Zapłotna

The Role of Internet Interaction in a Foreign Language Classroom

The article aims to characterize the benefits of incorporating elements of Internet interaction into the curriculum of practical language learning and to present its impact on the acquisition processes of students of the so-called “digital natives” generation. The presented results of the study on the use of new media during language classes show that digital communication is a factor eliminating the language barrier and facilitating the increase of motivation. The results also allow to outline the role of the teacher as a virtual language guide and present the level of digital competence of the students surveyed.