Initiating and maintaining contact with students on the Polish as a foreign language lesson

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present examples of verbal (oral) lectors’ behaviors that were aimed at initiating contact with students, maintaining attention and activating the participants in the institutionalized space, also the impact of lectures’ communicationon the quality and the way of teaching in a non-homogeneous group. The research material includes twelve 90-minute recordings (with transcripts) of a foreign language lessons conducted by 12 lecturers at the Polish Language Center for Foreigners in Łódź. The presented analysis of the statements of teachers of Polish as a foreign language allowed for the development of a register of typical, most common communication situations in which the teacher interacted with students, as well as the identification and systematization of recurring common elements forming communication patterns. The analysis is linguistic-glottodidactic, at the same time a small fragment of research on educational discourse in the language classroom carried out in 2010–2014 for the purposes of the doctoral dissertation.