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SP z naboru we wrześniu 2011 r.

Przygotowanie pedagogiczne do nauczania języka angelskiego

Zaliczenie przedmiotu „Konteksty współczesnej edukacji“

u p. A. Murkowskiej

9 czerwca 2012 r.

Comments and/or remarks to „Examination of Identity“ by Amin Maalouf from „Identidades Asesinas“, 2001, Madrid Alianza Editorial.

I have read the excerpt from the book with interest. However at first I thought it has nothing to do with me. My parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are not only from Poland but also from the same region – the historical Podlasie. The first generation to migrate ever were my parents and their siblings. And they did not move any further than to Warsaw and Lublin. And we as the next generation mostly stayed where we were born. So what to compare?

Then I realised that what Maalouf writes about is multitude of factors that our identity is built on rather than a mere geographical affiliation. And I came back to one of the very first sentences of the excerpt: „I search my memory to bring out as many components of my identity as possible...“

So I also searched my memory. Both my grandfathers were born in a Podlasie village. And both settled in the same town (where my parents met). However one of them called himself a peasant all his life and was a farmer as long as it was possible, whereas the other was proud of his family tree and a nobleman predecessor, and was an owner of a little store with car spare parts in the town. One was a communist and the other an AK soldier with a cousin who emigrated to England.

When I was a child I never thought of myself as a Varsovian. I was always a little bit surprised when somebody called me this. I had this strong feeling that my roots are somewhere in Podlasie and that I belong there.

But I also always knew that there is another world somewhere further. And it was not because I have lived in Warsaw, a capital city – for me it was my small local world. It was because I once met my grandfather’s cousin from England. I found out quite early that English is not yet another school subject but also a way of communicating, that there are people who actually speak English. Moreover I found out that there are people who speak more than one language. It was confirmed when a girl joined our class who had been on a diplomatic placement with her parents in one of Arabic countries and who spoke English with fluency, which seemed unachievable for me. Then in high school I met another girl who before coming back to Poland had been the best at Hungarian in her Budapest school. I loved to hear her speaking Hungarian. I made her retelling me films and stories in the language although I understood nothing.

I learned Russian because it was obligatory but I liked it. I learned English because my parents enrolled me for an after-school course and I liked it. I also liked Latin – compulsory subject in the humanistic class I was in in a high school. I learned French in the Warsaw French Institute because I wanted to. And I learned Spanish because I had lived in Spain for a year and a half when my husband was getting his MBA in Barcelona.

I do not know whether I like to learn languages because of my early experiences and my parents’ conviction that it is useful or because I happened to be a self-motivated student trying to do her best just to please teachers. What I know for sure is that the fact that I have been learning languages contributed to shaping me as a person that I am. I can read books and newspapers in originals, I can talk to people from different countries, I can watch TV news and films from around the world. What surprises me a lot is the fact that now I feel more at ease with some my friends from abroad than with some people living in the motherland of my parents. We speak the same language literally and figuratively with the first, which is not always true with the latter. And it is not about having the same views but about the freedom to express the views.

Recommendation of an activity chosen from the list included in „Plurilingual and pluricultural awarness in language teacher education. A training kit.“ European Centre for Modern Languages, Council of Europe Publishing

I have chosen the activity designed by Petr Najvar from Faculty of Education on Masaryk University in Czech Republic titled „What’s in a name?“

Name is a „starting point“ for every new acquaintance and still, as Petr Najvar put it, “people tend not to think about their own name very often“, although „it might be one of the first pieces of information that other people learn about them. In the language-teaching context, names provide very interesting linguistic material, which may serve as a means of introducing cultural diversity and complexity.“

For me as a future teacher the most „catchy“ was the statement that teachers “do perceive names of their pupils on various levels, mostly unconsciously, sometimes even jump to conclusions about their pupils based only on the names.” This made me appreciate that an activity that can help realise these various levels of people’s perception through their names (e.g. due to the fact that they are typical for the majority of society as well as minorities, immigrant names, etc, typical for the particular society) may be very useful both for a teacher and his or her students in order to avoid Pygmalion effect or Golem effect (when teachers recognise names of their own friends or even names of people they don’t like and subconsciously associate their feelings with the pupil, only because of the names).

Names (including family names) and the way they are created give us also rich cultural and social information such as: position of a man and woman in the society, the role of ancestors, etc.