Learning a foreign language - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

WŁODZIMIERZ ADAM WÓJCICKI
Learning a foreign language – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
In this article I shall explore several issues that I consider to be key factors in foreign language acquisition. These include the essence of learning the language and the way the quality of teaching materials used can affect the learning process.
Any questions regarding the essence of language and the essence of the process of studying it belong to exceptionally difficult ones and exclude the possibility of offering cut-and-dried answers. It is nevertheless possible to try and formulate more or less plausible hypotheses. Here is one of them:
Studying a foreign language requires that the learner should gradually acquire an internal repertoire of language resources (i.e. lexical items, referents and syntactic patterns) with which he or she will be able to respond linguistically in an adequate manner to different situations as they occur. The building up of the internal repertoire of means of language expression is accompanied by such processes as making a mental effort to remember referents, forgetting, retrieving portions of the language from memory, and is concomitant with a deep integration of the language being acquired with the learner’s own life and gradually gaining a new view of reality.
The acquisition of a new language is a creative process that demands a positive attitude. Therefore the quality of texts intended to be used for study is of some significance. Only an appropriate level of generality, absorbing subject matter and plenty of room to express himself creatively is capable of helping to stir the learner’s imagination and to correlate the text with his own individual, internal reality – this must be about himself and must correspond to his knowledge of life.
Studying in general and studying a foreign language in particular, is a highly individualized process. It is often the case that working in a group not always and not for everyone has an appropriate pace, a sufficient number of revisions and an adequate manner of explanation. And it is the explanations that are, more often than not, a basis for understanding anything because most of the textbooks used in our country contain no explanations in Polish (they are textbooks intended for “the whole world”, that is, for no one in particular). Consequently, the learner is overwhelmed by the feelings of being lost and helpless. With the lapse of time the feeling grows ...