Metalinguistic awareness of public school teachers teaching people with a migratory background

Abstract

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 created a tremendous impact on the Polish education system. In 2023, Ukrainian refugees represent 4% of all students registered. The current study focused on metalinguistic awareness among 45 public school teachers who taught various subjects to students with a migratory background, mostly refugees from Ukraine. The sample included both elementary and secondary levels of education and the language in question was Polish, here understood as a foreign/second language. A questionnaire interview designed to check the informants’ understanding of Polish functional grammar at A1 level served as a tool for data collection. As it turned out, four out of ten answers were incorrect or there was no answer at all. Alarmingly, only 29% of the responses were accurate. The questions that posed the biggest challenge were the distribution of prepositions (both semantic and structural), as well as noun inflection. Verb conjugation, on the other hand, was among the topics that the teachers knew quite well. Concluding, the study revealed that the teachers were not familiar with the majority of grammar terms and processes traditionally introduced at the elementary level. To keep face, many would rather offer an incorrect answer than admit to not knowing the correct one. Among the solutions, the author of the study suggested raising the linguistic awareness of all teachers in training and sensitizing them to the glottodidactic aspects of the Polish language, making our schools an even more welcoming place for immigrant students.