Intercultural and lingacultural layers of Olga Tokarczuk’s story Professor Andrews in Warsaw. An insight into the process of reading a text by learners of polish as a foreign language

Abstract

The article describes the course of a reading event with the participation of students of humanities studying Polish as a foreign language (PFL) at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Lodz in the academic year 2019/2020. This study is an attempt to gain insight into the glottodidactic process of reading Olga Tokarczuk’s story Professor Andrews in Warsaw. The glottodidactic values of the story were discussed, from a teacher’s perspective, in the second part of the work. Attention was paid to the multidimensionality of the text and the related opportunities for learners to discover layers of meaning and culture (including linguaculture layers). Reference was then made to research works that discussed the use of the intercultural approach in teaching foreign languages and PFL, as well as those that analyzed the language/linguaculture of the Polish People’s Republic. These topics are strongly related to the situation of the title character of the story and the space-time of the work (a helpless foreigner in Warsaw, the Polish People’s Republic, the initial days of martial law). The third, key part of the article, discusses the process of reading the text by a group of students. It was a partially guided process – the teacher developed a seven-point reading template that directed the reading of the text. The students’ task was to complete this questionnaire after reading the story on their own. At individual points in the template, readers were required to report the most important content of the story and to formulate reflective and evaluative statements. The written statements included in the students’ reading templates were discussed in detail. The analysis focused on: readers’ discovery of the text’s meaning, intercultural and linguistic layers, ways of reporting the difficulties readers encountered while reading, and comments in which they formulated opinions on the reading and assessed their own reading effort. The summary also draws conclusions about the text reading strategies used by students and the types of mediation. A set of survival strategies for foreigners in a foreign environment was also identified, based on the experiences of the hero of Olga Tokarczuk’s work.