PRIDE AND POWERLESSNESS:
EXPLORING SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION IN POLAND
Leanne Marie Cameron
B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 2006
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
TEACHING ENGLISH TO SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SPRING
2010
© 2010
Leanne Marie Cameron
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
PRIDE AND POWERLESSNESS:
EXPLORING SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION IN POLAND
A Thesis
by
Leanne Marie Cameron
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Dr. John T. Clark
__________________________________, Second Reader
Dr. Julian Heather
____________________________
Date
iii
Student: Leanne Marie Cameron
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
Dr. Julian Heather
TESOL
Department of English
iv
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
PRIDE AND POWERLESSNESS:
EXPLORING SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION IN POLAND
by
Leanne Marie Cameron
In the past two hundred years, Poland twice labored under the brutal occupation of its
stronger, militaristic neighbors, promoting anti-German and anti-Russian sentiment still
visible today. This research study inquires as to whether these attitudes have any impact
on the language selection of Polish university students. During November and December
of 2009, four undergraduate English pedagogy students at a mid-level Polish university
were interviewed in order to ascertain their attitudes toward the languages that they
studied, the motivation for studying these languages, and the role of social pressure in
becoming competent in English, German, or Russian. The results suggest that the
subjects viewed English as a neutral, prestige language unconnected to a specific culture,
be it American or British. In word, they expressed a similarly neutral attitude toward
German and Russian, though further analysis of their attitudes, contrasted with their
actions, demonstrated that the social and historical influence of anti-German and antiRussian sentiment may still play a role in their motivational processes. Further, this study
also considers that the seeming negativity toward these second languages results from
lack of choice in language selection and considers the future impact of this lack of choice
on the subjects' language future.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Dr. John T. Clark
_______________________
Date
v
DEDICATION
For my parents - without you, I would be nowhere.
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you so very much (i bardzo dziękuję) to Dr. John T. Clark, Dr. Julian Heather, Dr.
Anna Sloń, Dr. Włodzimierz Bartóg, and Dr. Eva Piotrowska-Oberda at Jan
Kochanowski University, the U.S.-Polish Fulbright Commission, Dr. Monica Freeman,
Dr. Mi-Suk Seo, my parents for catching my many errors, and my UJK students for their
patience and help.
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication ................................................................................................................................ vi
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................. vii
List of Tables ........................................................................................................................... ix
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
Purpose ....................................................................................................................... 6
2. POLISH HISTORY, 966-1795 ........................................................................................... 9
3. POLISH HISTORY, 1795-1939 ....................................................................................... 22
4. POLISH HISTORY, 1939-PRESENT .............................................................................. 32
5. LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM .............................................................................. 50
6. ATTITUDE AND MOTIVATION IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING ................ 64
7. SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION ............................................................................. 81
Methodology .............................................................................................................. 87
Research Questions .................................................................................................... 89
8. PRESENTATION OF THE DATA .................................................................................. 90
9. FINDINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS ....................................................................... 109
References ............................................................................................................................. 149
viii
LIST OF TABLES
Page
1.
Table 1: Students' Basic Information ......................................................................... 94
ix
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
The Polish Experience
"You must carry into the future the whole experience that is 'Poland.' It is a
difficult experience, perhaps the most difficult in the world, in Europe, in the
Church." -Pope John Paul II (Bloch, 1982, p. 1)
In autumn of 1939, “Poland,” a country frequently condemned to quotations as a
thousand years of history has seen her name scrawled and erased and scrawled and erased
again from the map of Europe, existed only historically, chopped and divided between
the German Third Reich war machine and the grizzled power of the Soviet Union. Young
Ryszard Kapuściński, who would grow to become the Polish-Lithuanian journalist whose
own fragmented identity mirrored the state of his homeland and whose little town would
later be incorporated into the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, came to school to
find new textbooks, something Soviet and Cyrillic, replacing the Roman orthography of
his native Polish. His teacher, who he would later bid farewell to through the slats of a
cattle car bound for one of the camps that was responsible for the death of an estimated
5,384,000 Jewish and non-Jewish Poles (Lukas, 1986, p. 39), sorrowfully announced that
the children would be learning a new language—and a new alphabet. He began with the
first letter of the Cyrillic alphabet: S. The children glanced incredulously at their teacher
2
and one protested the abnormality of an alphabet that would start with S. Instead of
offering an explanation, the teacher pointed to the title of their new textbook: they were
to follow the Soviet Bible of Voprosy Leninizma, Studies in Leninism, penned by Stalin
himself (Kapuściński, 1995). Even the Cyrillic alphabet had capitulated to Stalin’s power.
The twenty years of the Second Republic ended, and free state of Poland had fallen. By
1939, most of the country would agree that the Polish experience, indeed, had been and
would continue to be a difficult one.
A brief review of Polish history is best described with a parade of bleak
adjectives, fronted by Davies’ (2005a) classification of her history as both “terrible and
pathetic” (p. xi). Since Poland’s incarnation in 966, the nation has seen five separate eras
in which it was invaded by stronger outside forces and denied self-rule, in 1138, 1795,
1813, 1864, and 1939, though arguably the last hundred years have been the most brutal
and tumultuous in a thousand years of Polish civilization. The past twenty years of self
rule as the Third Republic, declared independent in 1990, have not yet erased the past
atrocities and the scars of Nazi brutality and Soviet propaganda that still cripple the
nation, despite an upturn in the economy and the 2004 entrance into the European Union
(Chłopicki, 2003).
Today, the historic section of Warsaw betrays the naïve tourist with its old-world
charm, with winding cobbled streets that open onto café-laden squares where perogi
(dumplings) and the finest Polish beers abound. Only postcards, hawked next to Baltic
amber pendants and hand-whittled chess pieces, divulge the past. Pictures of a
contemporary Stare Miasto (Old Town), with elaborate peacock scrollwork painted down
3
the sides of row houses, sit next to grainy black-and-white shots that show the city as it
was at the end of World War II: almost entirely destroyed, the city was reduced to three
feet of rubble in most places and lost nearly 200,000 of the inhabitants to warfare,
starvation, or outright extermination (Davies, 2005b, p. 355; Lukas, 1986). But almost all
evidence of Nazi destruction has been erased and the cement jungle of brutalist
architecture that is the new city bears witness to sixty years of Soviet influence. The
looming skyscrapers are haphazardly scattered around the city, divided by wide streets
that were built, some say, to allow for tank movements in case of insurrection. New
Warsaw, like many other cities throughout the ex-Soviet Bloc, exhibits the color palate of
Gorbachev grays and Brezhnev browns, weathered with acid rain and seeping rust stains,
a sharp contrast to the cheery saffron yellow and rose pink of the old square, Rynek
Starego Miasta.
Almost three hundred kilometers south of Warsaw, near the sleepy town of
Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau stands to this day as a massive field encased in a pen of
towering barbed-wire fences. From high above the ground, in a command tower once
manned by machine guns, the entire camp appears below as a graveyard, the foundations
of buildings burned down by the fleeing soldiers forming a grid of mathematical
precision. The crematoria are long gone, preserved in the photographs taken by U.S. air
reconnaissance which show the thick black smoke curling upward, though the remains of
the Auschwitz’s victims, 1.1 million by one count (Gutman & Berenbaum, 1998), can be
found in the earth, in the pathways, in the streams and forests nearby. Near Birkenau is
the mother camp, Auschwitz I, the more permanent of the two with its brick buildings
4
and infamous front entrance, an iron gate emblazoned with a German phrase viciously
promising prisoners that “work will set you free” (Arbeit macht frei).
Poland has seen many invasions, and this, the most brutal demonstration of
domination, began in 1939 when army of the Third Reich rolled into the west of Poland
on September 1. Following the initial invasion, the Germans, and later Soviet Russia,
made quick work of the country, destroying entire cities, crippling industry, and
massacring thousands in a matter of days. Hitler’s mandates for the future of Poland
demonstrated a commitment to annihilation unmatched in the nation’s thousand-year
history: a month prior to the invasion, he authorized the slaughter “without pity or mercy
all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language” (as quoted by Lukas, 1986,
p. 3) and thus made complete destruction of the Polish nationality “our primary task” (p.
4). Poland exhibited a similar commitment to survival, their unending patriotism and
dedication to their homeland demonstrated in that “no prominent Poles were ever willing
to collaborate with the Nazis” (p. 7). During the course of the next five years under Nazi
domination, education in Polish was made illegal, and schools from the elementary to the
university level were closed, all part of Hitler’s mandate that Poland was to be changed to
“an intellectual desert” (p. 10). Polish professors from thousand year-old Jagiellonian
University in Kraków and University of Warsaw were lined up and shot during purges
meant to rid the country of the intelligentsia (Lukas, 1986; Davies, 2005b). The Polish
Catholic church, abandoned by the Vatican and considered tantamount to Polish
nationalism, saw its nuns sent to labor camps and its priests imprisoned and murdered.
In 1944, near the end of the war, Poland’s situation experienced little change.
5
Again, her future was in the hands of outside forces, her fate argued between Churchill,
Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta. Borders, for the thousandth time in Polish history, were
adjusted, people were relocated on the proper sides of the boundaries: Germans on to the
West, the nationally confused Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian-Byelorussian peoples to the
East randomly assigned. After extensive negotiation, the Soviet Union took over full
control of Poland, a play for which the Western powers were “not prepared to go to war”
over (Polonsky, 1976, p. 47). Stalin established a puppet government, fronted by Polish
communists but its strings dulcetly plucked by the Kremlin. As the rest of Europe Proper,
west of the Berlin Wall, experienced reconstruction that reestablished France and
Germany as world powers, Poland labored under politics that Bloch (1982) labels as “one
of the most obscene examples of the human condition” (p. 53). After the devastating
losses of World War Two, the United Polish Workers party, which came into power from
1948 to 1981, affected a similar climate of fear and retribution, full of “murder, mass
arrests, abrogation of personal freedom, denial of privacy and basic human dignity, and
the falsification of Poland’s history” (p. 55). The cycle, again, began.
Poland has managed to emerge from this past, today a free country and vital
member of the European Union as the largest Central European nation. As such, it is a
country that values the hard-won triumphs of its past, its resilient culture and language in
a way that outsiders cannot quite grasp. Can we, Americans, so often the force of
dominance in the world both with our military and our viral cable television, truly
understand what is to be invaded? To be marginalized, systematically dismantled,
6
devalued to the point of genocide? To have one’s mother tongue banned, borders blotted
away, national pride made illegal and punished by death?
Were we, as Americans and Westerners, to personally endure a similar situation,
then few would feign surprise at Poland’s marked attitude of autonomy and persisting
spirit of nationalism, long since considered passé and condemned by the liberal politics
that now govern the European continent. Nationalism, once used to denote “the
conviction that their nations have an inalienable right to control their own destiny”
(Davies, 2005b, p. 5), has become something of a dirty word in liberal circles, understood
as the intolerant, “selfish, irrational, and disruptive, almost by definition” (p. 3) desire to
see one’s own nation exalted above others. This ideal, which sprang from the aftermath
of the French Revolution and spread throughout the European continent, carries more
weight in Eastern and Central European countries than the West, since “the unifying and
mobilizing power of nationalism” made possible the movements that eventually threw off
the communist regime (Wagner, 2003, p. 192).
Purpose of the Study
Keeping an understanding of historical context and overt nationalism in mind, this
study seeks to ascertain whether these factors, and any others, drive a student’s choice of
which second language to study. In Poland, nearly all children begin second language
study in the second grade, with English as the statistically most prominent language. A
2004/2005 study indicated that 65.3% of primary-aged children studied English, 34.2%
German, 6.7% Russian, 3.4% French, and .4% Spanish or Italian (OBOP Archive as
7
translated by Graves, 2008, p. 1). Though English as a language figures very little into
Polish history, Russian and German have been, at different times, forced upon the Poles
as a replacement for their mother tongue and functioned as the language of the nation’s
oppressors. Though the narrow focus presented here is concerned with Poland, whose
past history has developed an attitude of distrust for Germany and Russia, the topic can
be applied to nearly all language-learning contexts. With case studies of Polish students
who study English, Russian, and German, we are able to better understand the factors that
affect their selection and whether historical bias or feelings of nationalism play a role in
their continuation with that language.
In order provide an in-depth and and complete exploration of factors which
influence Polish students’ motivation, this paper will begin with a review of Polish
history as the root to understanding the Polish people. In looking back, the past hundred
years are arguably the most relevant to current events and perspectives. World War Two,
after all, was the catalyst for the implementation of the communist system. However, the
Germany invasion of Poland in 1939 was not an isolated event and must be understood in
the scope of Polish-German relations, which stretch back at least two hundred years
earlier. Further, few are aware of the past glory of the early Polish-Lithuanian union,
arguably the root of Polish national pride. Thus, this review of Polish history will begin
with the start of the Polish nation, move on to the glory of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, review the partions, and finally, focus heavily on the events of the past
century. Next, I will examine the critical perspective of nationalism, the relationship
between modern nationalism and langauge, and most specficially, the role of nationalism
8
in Polish history, culture, and language studies. In order to connect the history and
nationalism of Poland to the present research questions, I will also present an overview of
attitude and motivation studies in the field of lingustics in order to understand if past
research has answered or even established a foundation for looking at Polish students’
motivational factors. Finally, in the sixth section of the literature review, I will examine
the reasons traditionally proposed for second language selection, an obvious facet of
language motivation. With this broad literature review in mind, I will then present the
four students involved in the study in order to explore this concept of language selection
in Poland.
9
Chapter 2
POLISH HISTORY
966-1795
"History…permits us to look, as through a mirror, on everything relating to
heroism, wisdom, modesty, piety, and human folly." -Jan Długosz, Polish
Historian, 1415-1480 (Davies, 2005a, p. 5)
The Beginning: A Baptism
The moment, in the tradition of Latin Christian baptism, was no doubt brief: in a
second his head was ducked beneath the water and Mieszko I emerged, reborn and
reinvented. This one sacred ritual, this sacrament and right of passage into the possibility
of eternal splendor, came to mark the birth of a nation in 966. This maneuver, sparked by
to his marriage to the Catholic Czech princess Dubravka, effectively solidified Mieszko’s
power as the chief of the Polanian tribe, a branch of the Slavs, and allowed his initiation
into the powerful firm of the Roman Catholic Church (Davies, 2005a). But as much more
than a political scheme, Mieszko’s baptism bonded the Polanian people, later the Poles,
with their sacred consciousness.
This creation myth, venerated by saints and pagans alike, became known by
historians as “the baptism of Poland,” or Chrzest Polski, an event celebrated a thousand
years later throughout the People’s Republic of Poland. Both the church and the
communist state marked the year 1966 as Poland’s millennial birthday, though what is
10
known as Poland today has shifted radically over its thousand years (Davies, 2005a). But
this baptism still represents, however loosely, the beginning of a nation and the beginning
of a nationality—a gray, fluid term that for these purposes will be defined as members in
an “imagined community,” according to Benedict Anderson (Millar, 2005). A nation,
after all, functions by way of the “awareness from all those who consider themselves to
be members of a community that they share in common with people they have never
met” (p. 14). Specifically for nationality, people are members of a nation, which in our
modern era has come to refer to a geographical location, different from the noble estate
that offered membership, as in Poland six hundred years ago. Today Poland is understood
as an establishment that Friedrich Engels might term a “historical nation,” possessing a
national history “based on common membership of a polity, shared cultural values, as
well as a language” (p. 18). Though historians can’t pinpoint the physical site of the
spiritual cleansing, the story of the baptism itself marks the beginning of a historical
nation, one that at times excluded its own citizens and has always struggled for
recognition by its neighbors, whose actions have decided the course of its history.
Poland’s precarious geography, tagged “the villain of her history” by Davies
(2005a, p. 23), undoubtedly shares some blame for her seeming inability to function
without upheaval. The North European Plain, which reaches from the Russian Ural
Mountains, stretches past what is conventionally defined as “Europe,” to France and the
Atlantic. Sandwiched between two countries with wandering eyes, without the
mountainous borders afforded by the Alps or the Pyrenees, no natural boundary exists
other than a collection of easily forded rivers and the wide, sweeping land does little to
11
halt the advance of an invading army. Labeled “the perennial victim” (Pease, 1994, p. 3),
“the disputed bride,” or even “the gap between two stools” (Davies, 2005a, p. 23), Poland
has been wrenched between the superpowers of Russia and Germany, tossed back and
forth in a game of imperial hot potato, broken into pieces, and holds the dubious
distinction of being the first modern European nation to be wiped from Europe’s political
map (Bloch, 1982). The nation’s borders have shifted and rolled, expanding and
shrinking for a thousand years, and finally coming to rest in their current position in the
aftermath of World War Two.
At onset of the second millennium, nations on the European land mass were
geographic diaphragms that inhaled and exhaled, their borders shifting accordingly as
kings and rulers of tribes rose and fell with the current of medieval political strife
(Davies, 2005a). The earliest history pages of Poland are dominated by the Piast dynasty,
of which Mieszko is thought to be the first ruler, who was considered to be only
marginally successful in unification in their nation-making efforts. Their kingdom, if we
are to call it such, centered around Poznań, a city now found in the western swath of
countryside, and later expanded to include the Vistulanians surrounding the Wistła River
in Kraków to the east (Davies, 2005a).
But the burgeoning kingdom faced threats from outside forces: to the east,
Mongol hordes made quick work of Manchuria and progressed over Eurasia to establish a
base in Ruthenia, sourtheast of Polish territory in modern-day Ukraine (Pease, 1994).
Dominating the country in 1241, the Golden Horde of Batu Kahn rolled through Kraków,
Sandomierz, and Wrocław with an euthusiasm duplicated eight hundred years later by the
12
Third Reich, inspiring a Krakóvian legend that a trumpter, high in the belltower of St.
Mary’s Church in the Rynek Glowny, was pierced through the throat by a Mongol arrow
mid-song. To this day the Hejnał is heard from the church, the melody cut off sharply to
commemorate the trumpeter’s unhappy demise (Davies, 2005a). The Catholic Poles,
holding out the cross of the Catholic church against the godless invaders, eventually
reclaimed their land but faced a new enemy, in a most unlikely form. Proving more
dangerous than the Mongol invaders were the Germanic Teutonic Knights, invited by
Polish Duke Konrad of Mazovia, to help the kingdom subdue and christianize the pagan
civilizations on the northen Baltic coasts. The Teutonic Knights, settling into the region
and creating their own fortresses, expanded their holdings and brought savage brutality
that was later turned on the Poles themsevles, embodying the most “the most un-Christian
elements of the Christian world,” using violence and bloodshed to incorporate and extend
the power of their holdings (Davies, 2005a, p. 74). Later, as a shared enemy of both
Poland and Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights provided a reason for the two countries to
solidify their power and unify (Pease, 1994).
This chapter of Polish history is marked with the violent upheaval typical of
medieval history, fickle loyalties, and shifting boundaries meant that subjects under Piast
control were not unified into a “single, organic whole” until 1320 with the coronation of
Władysław I Łokietek, curiously nicknamed Ladislaus I the Elbow-High (Davies, 2005a,
p. 56). As a result, the Piast princes measured their power not in land but in subjects,
what historians term the “Polish obedience” (p. 56). Łokietek was the first officially
recognized king, emerging as the Rex Poloniae (King of Poland), a Latin title bestowed
13
by the pope to accompany the promotion from principate to Corona regni Poloniae, the
Kingdom of Poland (p.61).
During this period, the high middle ages, Poland would not have been thought the
badgered orphan of Europe. While other nations of Europe battled the plague and saw a
third of their population convulse and die, Poland did not contract Black Death, and, as
result, began to attract populations of Jewish immigrants fleeing both disease and
oppression abroad, resulting in the largest group of Jews to be found on the continent
(Davies, 2005a). Thus marked Poland’s rise to power, the final days of the Piasts and the
development of a capital city that became the intellectual and cultural center, the stage set
for renaissance. And it is in Kraków, on the majestic Wawel Hill where the Polish kings
knelt to receive their crown, that the regal sentiment of Poland is best understood.
Kraków and Jagiellonian Era
In the center of Kraków, settled next to the elbow curve of the Wisła, rises the
limestone Wawel Hill, part fortress, part castle, part cathedral, a medeival trifecta that
symbolizes a noteworthy Polish past. Under Kazimierz II Odnowiciel (Casimir the
Restorer), the capital was established here, overlooking the city and stategically placed
along the green-carpeted banks of the river (Podlecki & Rotter, 1997). These
Romanesque buildings, which would evolve with the visions of later kings, formed the
seat of the regal Polish gentry, resulting in the patchworked castle and cathedral, equal
parts Roman and Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. The Hill itself is a stone pedastle
from which vines drip down, slinking slowly toward the streets below, green icing on red
14
brick. On the east corner of the Hill, a reward for the steep climb up the side, is the Royal
Castle, begun in the Renessance style in the early 1500s by King Alexander and his
brother Sigismund I and evolved, nearly a century later, into an early Baroque structure
under the command of King Sigismund III (History of Wawel Hill, 2009). The Castle
itself, at times in its history a military hospital, a church, and the home of German
governor-general Hans Frank, is set in a square around an open court where gargoil rail
spouts look out over the tourists milling about on the stone below.
From the top of the Hill, much of the city is visible, the old and the new. The
nearby steeple of the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, when looking north toward the Old
City, caps the coal-colored dome above the marble façade that celebrates the decadence
of 17th century Baroque. Behind it you will find the imposing gray cereal box of an
apartment complex, an oddity among the sea of rooftops in sienna and nutmeg, and far in
the distance again the ancient, with the wide open Rynek Glowny, the market square,
where an imposing staute of the great poet Mickiewicz stands yards from Mexican and
sushi eateries.
While Poles saw their Warsaw razed during World War II, Krakow’s castles and
cathedrals escaped the invader’s destructive touch due to the long-standing belief that it
was in fact a “Germanic” city. The buildings, the brick of Wawel Hill, the copper spires
of Saint Mary’s church, even the Sukiennice, or Cloth Hall, with its scalloped portals that
lead into the long hall where fabric and leather and spices and lead were once bartered,
remain to this day as a symbol of the past. As a relic of the “Golden Age,” when the
Commonwealth established a great center of humanism in Poland (History of Wawel Hill,
15
2009) this “nucleus of Polish national culture” truly developed into the national treasure
that it is today (Podlecki & Rotter, 1997, p. 2).
This era of Poland dawned in 1385 with the marriage of Polish queen Jadwiga to
Lithuanian Jogaila, later crowned with the suitably Polish name Władysław-Jagiełło, at
the Union of Krewo. This union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Dutchy of
Lithuania, creating the republic formally titled Rzeczpospolita, or the Polish-Lithuanian
Union, rose to power in Central Europe rapidly, due to the weakness of surrounding
tribes and developing national groups. Russia was not yet unified, and still consisted of
the disunited and battling tribes of Pskov, Tver, Moscow, Ryazan, and Viatka. France and
England were preoccupied with each other, a common story throughout history, and far
too absorbed in the Hundred Year’s War to pay attention to a rising power far from their
own shores. The countries of Scandinavia were similarly engaged in their own affairs and
even the Turks, hard on their course to conquer the entirety of Europe, were distracted
with Balkan skirmishes (Davies, 2005a). Thus, during the sixteenth century, Poland
Lithuania existed as the largest nation on the European continent, and remained so until
the partition and the rise of Imperial Russia.
At the onset, it seemed a strange union. Poland, since the conversion of the first
king, displayed a dedication to Catholicism that was markedly different from the nations
of Western Europe, who sent their soldiers off to the crusades with papal blessings. The
concept of fighting the pagan held none of the romantic appeal that it might have in the
West, since the pagan was constantly on Poland’s doorstep or in her backyard. The nation
16
even became the target of crusading marauders in the form of the Teutonic Knights, who
spent more time harassing fellow Christians than converting the infidel. As such, Polish
Catholicism was thought to be deeply internal and personal, demonstrating “extreme
inward piety” and practitioners shunned forcible conversion (Davies, 2005a, p. 132).
Lithuania, on the other hand, appeared content to remain Europe’s final pagan
outpost, managed to thwart the efforts of Catholic missionaries until the late 1300s, when
the Teutonic leader Winrich Von Kniprode stood poised to convert the nation with the
usual bloodthirsty, Vatican-approved vigor (Davies, 2005a). Better from the Poles, it was
decided, that the inevitable forces of Christianity be contracted, and thus the union that
lasted four hundred years was born, its decendents reigning from atop Wawel Hill in a
castle that became embelatic of the era (History of Wawel Hill, 2009).
As a joint force, the Commonwealth managed the eventual defeat of the Teutonic
Knights, which occurred in 1410 at the battle at Grunwald, and continued to expand from
this victory. At the height of its power, the ruling Jagiellonian Dynasty had
representatives or relatives in positions of power both in Bohemia and Hungary, creating
an empire that reached from the Black Sea to the Baltic, and the fringes of the Mongol’s
Golden Horde in the east to the Danube in the west (Pease, 1994). This empire remained
strong until defeat by the Ottomans in 1526, who wrestled away both Bohemia and
Hungary in the Battle of Mohács. Again Poland, as a part of the Poland-Lithuania Union,
saw itself as defending the shield of Christendom, Catholics surrounded on all sides by
the Muslim Turks in Central Europe.
17
Despite losing territory, the next two hundred years marked the most prosperous
in the history of the Commonwealth, which became one of the largest food providers for
the whole of Western Europe. A strong agricultual industry developed along the banks of
the Wisła (Vistula in English), the central river that originates in the Outer Western
Carpathians and cuts north to its mouth at the Baltic sea. Since the river ran through land
now united under one political head, a corn and grain trade was established with foriegn
interests, primarily Dutch businessmen, that lead to the growth of a merchant class
(Davies, 2005a). The trade helped to both solidify the power of the landowner-nobles and
preserve the traditional rural society, creating the szlachta, or noble class, who controlled
much of the land and, as a result, the peasants who worked it.
Compared to other European nations, the Polish szlachta made up a large
percent of the population at 7-10%, with individuals who varied drastically in wealth and
holdings. This noble body came to establish the Sejm, the noble parliament, whose duties
included making laws, controlling trade, and electing the monarchy. This pre-democracy,
though controlled by few, managed to “foster a spirit of civic liberality unmatched in the
Europe of its day” and played a central role in creating a tradition of individual liberty
and “golden freedoms” that the Poles hold dear (Pease, 1994, p. 11). Though the system
lasted for two hundred years, resentment between the lower class of peasantry and the
upper noblemen grew exponentially, and eventually collapsed prior to the partition by
Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1795.
A further aspect of the “liberal” Jagiellonian Commonwealth was concerned with
religious freedoms. As mentioned earlier, much of the European Jewry had relocated to
18
Poland following bouts of the plague and the purges in Spain and Austria. Prior to
Jagiellonian rule, the 1264 General Charter of Jewish Liberties assured Jews the right to
travel round the country without molestation, to engage in trade, to pursue their own
religious practices, including worship in their synagogues, Jewish burial and ritual
slaughter, and to be exempted from serfdom or slavery (Davies, 2005a, p. 66).
Under the Jagiellonian Kings, these rights were continued, and further Jewish
immigration was even encouraged by King Sigismund I who allowed Jewish
communities to administer their own affairs, including tax collection (Davies, 2005a). As
a result, Poland had the largest concentration of Jews in Europe by the mid-sixteenth
century, an estimated 150,000 by 1582 (Pease, 1994, p. 13) and increased to 750,000 by
1795 (Weinryb, 1976, p.11). This number grew to 3.3 million by 1938, representing ten
percent of the total population of Poland, ninety percent of who were murdered during
the Second World War (p. 194).
The Protestant Reformation came to Poland in 1523 in the form of Lutheran,
Calvinist and Hussite groups, who suffered intense persecution until a stay ordered by the
Sejm in 1552. In the 130 years that followed, religious executions were suspended and
the nation continued its tradition of “providing refuge” for non-Catholic religious groups
within the Polish-Lithuanian lands (Pease, 1994, p. 13).
Besides allowing liberties unheard of in their time, the Jagiellonian Kings were in
power during the time of the Polish Renaissance, an era whose title seems oxymoronic to
Westerners ignorant of Polish accomplishments. Though achievements in architecture
and painting were “modest” at best (Davies, 2005a, p. 117), establishments of learning
19
and research, including the University in Kraków (today known as the Jagiellonian
University) founded by Queen Jadwiga, flourished in the sciences and litarature. Nicholas
Copernicus (Mikołaj Kopernik in Polish, 1473-1543), born in Prussian lands incorporated
into Poland in 1466, proposed that the earth rotated around the sun, not vise-versa, during
his study at the University of Kraków, and thus exemplifies the “universal mind”
glorified by the Renaissance (p. 119). Poets and writers, including Jan Kochanowski
(1530-1584), wielded the Polish language as a tool for exemplifying beauty and grace
and encouraged national pride for the spoken tongue. Also a student at the university in
Kraków, worldwide recognition of him and others helped establish the university as an
important center of European thinking and learning (Pease, 1994, p. 13).
The monarchy, ruling a country strong throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, began to unravel from pressure within and without. Warsaw fended off
Ukranian Cossack attacks, though much of the country east of the city fell to the
Muscovite-backed rebels. Charles X of Sweden, seeing Tsar Alexis’ new holdings,
invaded the country from the north along the Baltic and swept southward, conquering
land that the Polish-Lithuanians won back in a show of unity (Pease, 1994). But the
Golden Age was over, replaced by one of fragmentation, interior bickering and struggle,
and eventual defeat. War and disease raveneged the country for the next hundred years,
with the surrounding countries taking pieces of land by force or in treaties, slowly
chipping away at the Commonwealth.
The Jagiellonian Dynasty fell for lack of an heir in 1572, and modifications were
made to the governing structure so that the king, selected by the Sejm, functioned as a
20
sort of executive partner to the legislative body. Elected monarchs were often found
outside of Polish lands, and power became consolidated with the individual nobles,
leaving a decaying central governing system that crumbled just as surrounding political
realms were beginning to gain power. This weakening of centralized authority meant
increased control from foriegn seats in Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. To the east,
Russian Empress Catherine the Great was able to manipulate Polish politics, installing
Stanisław August Poniatowski as king of Poland-Lithuania in 1764 (Pease, 1994).
In total, the nation was partitioned three times duing this period, the first of which
occurred in 1772, when Poland-Lithuania lost land to the east, south, and west, area that
encompased such cities as Gdańsk (renamed Danzig by the Prussians) and Lwów
(renamed by the Austrians), along with land to the east in present-day Ukraine and
Belarus (Davies, 2005a). But the Commonwealth retained the Polish heartland, and
Stanisław attempted to invigorate the land, obviously suffering due to faulty
governmental institutions, by preaching Enlightenment ideals, accepting the idea of
equality for all classes of society (Pease, 1994). This resulted in Europe’s first written
constitution, on May 3, 1791, written by the king and the Four Years’ Sejm. Praised by
outside nations, even the Prussian minister Hertzberg, wrote in a quiet letter to a Warsaw
envoy that the Polish constitution was “more firm and better organized than the English”
(Palmer, 1964, p. 90). Under the new constitution, powers were separated between
executive, legislative, and judicial branches and sovereignty was established for the
people, meaning “the noble and bourgeois classes” (Pease, 1994, p. 19). The constitution,
however, was not enough to hold the nation together. The concept of democracy
21
undermined the ideals of the neighboring Russian state and any prospect of Polish
security and even prosperity ran counter to the wishes of the three neighboring nations.
Thus, Russia invaded and the second partition occurred in 1793, reducing PolandLithuania to a strip of land between the Baltic and Kraków, sandwiched on all sides by
the seeping empires (Palmer, 1964).
In a defiant move, the first of many to come in the remainder of Polish history,
military officer Tadeusz Kościuszko, himself a veteran of the American Revolution, lead
a revolt that had modest successful but was later aborted by Russian General Alexander
Suvorov (Palmer, 1964). In a manuever considered across Europe to be criminal, the
three powers dismembered Poland into three segments, with the Prussians controlling
Poznań and Warsaw to the east, the Austrians Kraków and Lublin in the south, and the
Russians all territory west of Lublin (Davies, 2005a). Poland, as a nation on the European
map, ceased to exist.
22
Chapter 3
POLISH HISTORY
1795-1939
"For the Polish Nation did not die; its body lies in the grave, but its soul has
descended from the earth, that is, from public life, to the abyss, that is, to the
domestic life of the nations, who suffer slavery in their country and outside their
country, that is may see their sufferings." -Adam Mickiewicz, Polish Poet, 17981855 (Weintraub, 1954, p.196)
Three Polands
The partition of Poland, cleaved in three, was an action that “suppressed the very
name of Pole” (Konopczyński, 1920, p. 45), depriving the szlachta of the freedoms that
had come to define their existence. The Prussian and Russian powers, engaged in a
continental rivalry, implemented governmental systems that effectively striped the Poles
of the progressive legal systems that had previously governed the land. In Prussian
Poland, for example, the law code was replaced with a system that instigated crude forms
of punishment, including whipping, and relied on a defective trial system. The Prussian
goal, it seemed, was to further divide Polish society, exacerbating differences between
the peasants, Jews, and merchant class, a sort of divide-and-conquer mechanism that
would abet the spread of German culture and language. By stifling education, mandating
German language, and encouraging a mortgage system that leveled heavy debts on
peasants, Polish rights and lands were stripped away, increasing the power and the
holdings of the Prussians (Konopczyński, 1920).
23
As in Prussian Poland, where German became the language of education and law,
Austrian Poland too adopted a position of furthering the German language. Under
Hapsburg rule, German was made the language of the courts and public offices, and the
government encouraged heavy Austrian-German immigration to the area, as if slowly
erasing the natural border between Germanic and Slavic blood. While decreasing the rent
fees of the peasants, authorities placed the work of debt collecting on the nobles, further
driving a wedge between the classes. Taxes were increased tenfold, leaving a onceflourishing country mired in poverty, a factor that would later force millions to flee for
the greener shores of America (Konopczyński, 1920).
But for all of the hardships experienced under Prussian and Austrian rule, the
marginalization of Polish language and the increase of taxes paled in comparison with the
first years of partition under Catherine II. The empress sought to dismantle Polish society
by assimilating the peasant population with the Russian mujiks, implementing a feudal
system tantamount to slavery and requiring a mandatory twenty-five years of military
service for the Russian crown. Religious persecution forced priests into monastery
prisons; bishops were removed from their positions, effectively severing any existing ties
between Poland and Rome. As a result, the further Russification of the Poles continued,
as more than 5,000 were forced to convert to Orthodoxy at the onset of the final partition.
Following Catherine, the more lenient Paul I and later Alexander I loosened their grasp
on Poland and rescinded the limits on the Catholic Church, enacting a more liberal (for
the era) system of government (Konopczyński, 1920).
24
But underneath the surface boiled a resistance to this foreign rule, that stripped
Poles of their language, their way of life, their culture, even their liberal social hierarchy.
In an underground resistance movement, based outside of the Polish lands in such locales
as Venice, Constantinople, and Paris, ex-patriots sought an answer for “the Polish
Question,” even forming a Polish legion that marched on behalf of Napoleonic France
under the motto, “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła: No, Poland is not yet lost” (Konopczyński,
1920, p. 53). Helping to take Rome, and even leveling several victories against the
Austrians, these soldiers were eventually shipped to San Domingo, Hispaniola, to quell a
revolt that lead to their eventual deaths by fever. Still, historian Konopczyński (1920)
declares, “it served to at least prove the unquenchable love of the Polish nation for
liberty; it testified to the resurrection of Poland before the tribunal conscience of Europe
(p. 53).
With the advent of Napoleon in the early 1800s, the French crusader seemed a
sort of Messiah to the beleaguered Poles. His promises to the Poles, who were the
conquests of his enemies in Central and Eastern Europe, spoke of salvation but delivered
little change. Perhaps the only evidence of Napoleon’s work in Poland was the
establishment of the Dutchy of Warsaw, “basically a French puppet,” carved from land
reclaimed from the Hapsburgs (Pease, 1994, p. 23). Though the Dutchy fell in 1813 to the
Russians and Polish faith in Napoleon perished with his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, this
era came to serve as a rallying point in Polish history, breeding nationalism and
convincing both Poles and other liberal-minded Europeans that an independent Poland
was “a necessary element of a just and legitimate European order” (p. 23).
25
The Rise of Nationalism
Following Napoleon, much of Europe was incensed in the business of creating
national idenities, establishing patriots that, in years earlier, were only to be found among
the noble classes. In the Polish lands, especially, language and culture provided an
unbeforeseen “rationale for ethnic loyalty and resistance to assimilation” into Germanic
or Russian cultures (Pease, 1994, p. 23). Lead by Poland’s patron poet, Adam
Mickiewicz, whose near-biblical assessment of Poland’s past and present inspired an
almost religious brand of nationalism, and the composer Chopin, who used his nation’s
tragic past as inspiration for his soaring symphonies, Polish nationalism shuddered and
writhed under foreign rule in the mid-nineteenth century, naturally progressing to
insurrection, and reaching a fever pitch in both 1830 and 1863 (Pease, 1994).
Following Napoleon’s exit from Poland, the Russian government in St. Petersburg
granted its Polish sector a liberal constitution, even allowing an army and some form of
governmental autonomy for nearly a decade. In 1830, however, the situation had
drastically changed, with Russian control again tightening around the Polish neck,
reacting to intellectual societies that heralded nationalism. Expecting French support but
receiving none, revolt broke out pitting the Polish troops against the might of the
Russians, resulting in a year-long war that ended with members of the Polish resistance
exiled to France and the dawn of harsh suppression of religious and intellectual pursuits
(Pease, 1994).
26
As had been demonstrated thus far, Poland’s independence would have to come
from forces within, despite divisions within the country and the constant, abusive check
of the partition powers. The movements of intellectual societies were kept under
surveillance, their actions often curtailed by police force, and preempted by dwindling
supplies and numbers. Military force leveled stricter repression on the nationalist
insurgents, effectively preventing these idealists from mounting an effective revolution in
1848-1849, when democratic revolutions swept the continent.
A final attempt occurred in 1863 against the tsarist forces in Russian Poland,
resulted in fifteen months of war and culminating with the Russians removing all Polish
figures from the government. Polish lands became a continuation of the Russian empire,
causing the nationalist groups in Poland to reassess their methods of pushing for
independence. Instead of insurgency and attempts of force against obviously greater
opponents, leaders looked within the nation and sought to gain support for their
movement by “Organic Work,” in fortifying the people through education, economic
prosperity, and modernization of a thoroughly rural society (Pease, 1994). The Poles, it
seemed, had not given up the dream of self-rule, but wisely decided to wait until for an
opportunity that would surely come.
Meanwhile, persecution of the Poles and their culture increased, this time from
two sides as the Prussians joined the Russians in tightening control of Polish lands,
creating a vice from both sides meant to suppress Polish nationality. At this time,
language served as the “sole possession of the Polish race that had not been stripped
away by partitions” (Coleman, 1934, p. 168) and thus became the focal point that the
27
Prussians, both during the partitions and later by Germany during the Third Reich, and
the Russians attempted to eradicate. Russia, mirroring Prussian action years earlier, made
Russian the language of judicial proceedings, educational instruction, and government
administration in 1868. In Prussian Poland, as of 1873, past laws that had somewhat
lapsed were reinstated and again German became the language of instruction and the
language of the court system. The tight grip on Poland seen at the start of the final
partition had overcome any semblance of democracy that had developed over the century.
Following these developments, Polish became the language of rebellion. At the
turn of the century, boycotts began to spring up, at the University of Warsaw in 1905,
where Russian was the language of instruction, and continued throughout the land.
Secondary school students went on strike in German-controlled Września, refusing to
pray in German, and met with physically abusive consequences (Coleman, 1934).
In Austrian Poland, on the other hand, Polish citizens enjoyed relative freedom
compared to the oppressive anti-Polish movements in the rest of Poland. In Galicia, the
Austrian-controlled parition area from the southeast corner of Poland that extended into
modern-day Ukraine, the Catholic religion was shared with the Austrians, thus no
persecution of the Church or priests occurred. In the second half of the nineteenth
century, Austria-Hungary, the formal title for the Hapsburgs as of 1867, began to enact
liberal measures that allowed Polish politicians to form the Sejm, resurrected from the
pre-partition era, that represented Galicia in the Viennese government. This psuedo-selfrule helped establish a reputation for Galicia as a place of tolerance, further exhibited in
the thriving university communities in Kraków and Lwów, where native-language
28
instruction was allowed from 1869 when Polish replaced German in both educational and
governmental settings (Davies, 2005b). Art thrived as well, with the establishment of the
famous Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, which was later looted by Nazis bent on
destroying evidence of Polish artistic heritage (Berge, Cohen, Edsel, & Newnham, and
Berge, Cohen, & Newnham, 2006).
Despite political freedoms, Galicia exhibited some of the worst statistics in
partitioned Poland. An overabundance of rural inhabitants, including German settlers,
exhausted the fertility of the land, resulting in the death of nearly 50,000 per year from
starvation alone. With both the highest birth and death rates, some two million residents
at the turn of the century left for the United States, with nearly 5% of the region, or
400,000, departing in 1913 alone (Davies, 2005b, p. 108).
World War I and the Second Republic
Poland’s partitioning forces, who until World War I functioned in a fragile
balance with each other, became immediate enemies as Europe cracked into two
opposing sides, with Russia joining with England and France to back Serbia, leaving
Austria and Prussia, now Germany, joining to form the central power block. In order to
conjure support for the Central Powers, Germany and Austria declared the kingdom of
Poland from fragments of the past commonwealth as to prevent the partitioned lands
from supporting Russia. While some argued that a Russian victory in the war would unite
the Polish lands under Russian rule and thus reunify the area, others, including the leader
of the Polish Socialist Party, Józef Piłsudski, called for a fully independent Poland
29
consisting of the three partitioned areas, and formed home militias to aid in defeating
Russia (Pease, 1994).
War, wrecking its usual havoc, displaced millions from Galicia, already suffering
from food shortages long before the onset of war. Galician refugees fled the oncoming
Germans, disappearing into Russian territory as the Germans marched as far east as
Warsaw, once occupied by the Russians during the partitions. Revolution caused massive
upheaval in Russia, resulting in troop withdrawal from the eastern front, and Woodrow
Wilson, president of the United States as the nation entered the war in 1917, crusaded for
the cause of democracy in Poland, endowing the war with a new, higher purpose. The
Central Powers finally bowed to the pressure in 1918, with the collapse of the imperial
German command and the Hapsburg Empire, and Piłsudski arrived in Warsaw to set up a
new, independent Poland, restoring to the map a nation that had disappeared for 123
years (Pease, 1994).
Momentarily, in 1918, Poland took in a breath of fresh air. European empires, for
the moment, had fallen out of favor and a newly independent nation appeared ready to
find its place in the geography of Central Europe. Schools, both for children and adults,
could again teach in their native language and learn a balanced view of history that gave
credence to their nation’s glorious past. Freedoms known two hundred years earlier came
back in vogue, this time applied to all levels of society. But the twenties and thirties were
not easy years for Europe: in Russia to the east, the October Revolution of 1917 and
following war left the country in the hands of the Bolsheviks, opening a dire and ungodly
chapter with the later Stalin years. And to the west, the Germans fared no better,
30
recovering from their defeat in the First World War under Adolph Hitler, whose gospel of
national exaltation and vehement anti-Semitism led the nation to once again train its eyes
on Poland, where an estimated 2.7 million Jews resided as of 1931, one of the largest
populations in Europe (Davies, 2005b, p. 301).
Poland itself struggled in the midst of a war-torn landscape. Like never before, the
country’s infrastructure had been shattered by conflict, consisting of three regions
attempting to become one again, with the problems of post-communist Germany in the
nineties, but tripled. Under the authoritarian rule of Piłsudski, despite a 1918 consitution
modeled on the French Republic, the crevice between the minorities and the majority of
Slavic, Catholic Poles deepened, alienating Ukranians, Jews, Byelorussians, and the
remaining Germans. The Poles were not immune to the air of anti-Semitism that filtered
through Europe, resulting in economic repression and outright discrimination toward the
Jews, with laws that appeared petty but spoke of a dark undercurrent, such as the
resolution that banned Jewish and non-Jewish students from sharing university desk
benches (Davies, 2005b). Urbanization that began during the partitions also exacerbated
the distance between Pole and Jew, with the creation of a new urban class that vied for
city work that had long been done by the Jews (Pease, 1994).
Politically, Poland naturally distanced itself from its powerful neighboors and
relied greatly on France, despite the ambivalent stance that the French had taken a
hundred years earlier when the Polish uprisings attempted to shake the hold of the
invaders. Further, the French decision to look the other way as Hitler rose to power
31
caused Poland to sign nonagression pacts with both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,
a move to stave off any future conflicts (Pease, 1994). As French support waned with the
start of the 1930s, Poland, it seemed, was again sandwiched between two increasingly
powerful—and disturbing—forces.
32
Chapter 4
POLISH HISTORY
1939-PRESENT
"Those dying here, the lonely / forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for
them / the language of an ancient planet / Until, when all is legend / and many
years have passed, On a new Campo dei Fiori / rage will kindle at a poet’s
word." Excerpt, “Campo Dei Fiori” by -Czesław Miłosz, Polish Poet, 1911-2001
(Miłosz, 2001, p.35)
Hitler’s war against Poland was hardly a conventional one. In nine hundred years
of history, the Poles had fought numerous wars against invaders: the Mongol Hordes, the
Teutonic Knights, the Cossack Tatars, the Russians, the Hapsburgs, the Prussians, the
Swedes. But Hitler waged a war different from any of these, a sharp departure from any
war that the entire continent of Europe had ever seen, because this was not just war: this
was hatred given life through systematic annihilation and apocalyptic extermination,
aimed not only at the Jews but the Poles as well.
War began in Poland with an act of deceit. On August 31, 1939, a ragtag band of
convicts, dressed for the part in Polish uniforms, attacked a German radio station in
Gleiwitz to broadcast a message of Polish patriotism, belt out a song or two, and fire a
few shots in the air. Promised freedom by Nazi State Security Sturmban-fuehrer Alfred
Helmut, the men nicknamed for their operation codename, Konserwen, or “tin cans,”
burst out of the station where the dreaded Schutzstaffel or SS guards waited with machine
33
guns. Within hours, the Third Reich broadcast news of this abortive and unprovoked
attack by the Polish army, to the surprise of both the actual Polish army and the rest of
the world. In the dark hours of the next morning, the German army, miraculously
mobilized so close to the Polish border, marched across the Polish countryside (Davies,
2005b). With attacks on the ground, from the sea, and in the air, the capital of Warsaw
fell on September 28 and the rest of the country followed by October 5. In one month,
after eighteen years of independent rule, Poland disappeared from the map, slashed
according to the Soviet-German Pact with a “pound of flesh” to both the Nazis and the
Soviets (Lukas, 1986, p. 2).
Before the advent of this thinly veiled excuse for an attack, Nazi Germany, under
the iron leadership of Adolph Hitler, had divined Poland’s fate. The Poles, it was decided,
were to serve as slave labor until the establishment of a permanent German colony in the
Polish lands, at which time their services would no longer be needed and they, like the
Jews before them, would be destroyed. On August 22, 1939, eight days before the Third
Reich was “provoked” into invasion, Hitler issued a unilateral death warrant for his
Slavic neighbors, calling for killing, “without pity or mercy all men, women, and children
of Polish descent or language. Only then can we obtain the living space we need” (Lukas,
1986, p. 3). After the Jews, the Poles were the central target of Hitler’s blind hatred,
branding them with the name Untermenschen or subhuman, the objects of wrath.
This policy of genocide from the onset hung as a black shadow over all aspects of
Polish life, reaching beyond the casualties of common war and even beyond simply
34
annihilating the population. In order to debase the population and devastate the culture,
the invaders focused on destroying elements of Polish culture that might suggest an
intelligence that would betray the untermenschen label. As a result, the Germans targeted
libraries, universities, and schools in a separate war on the intelligentsia, along with
statues, historic buildings, and art museums that revealed advancement (Lukas, 1986).
Thousands of pieces of art, in the form of paintings, sculptures, and even the enormous
wooden alter piece from St. Mary’s Church in Kraków, were packed onto trains and sent
to Germany, all evidence of a thriving culture slowly ebbing away with each steam
engine pointed west. Today, historians have compiled a database listing the 59,000 know
items that disappeared during the war, representing just ten percent of Poland’s total loss
(Berge, Cohen, Edsel, & Newnham, and Berge, Cohen, & Newnham, 2006). Western
Europe, in the meantime, looked away and abandonded former alliances, content for the
moment to allow Hitler’s machine to swallow another chunk of the continent and doing
little until the Führer trained his eyes on Scandinavia. The Russian Red Army, however,
itching for its own piece of Poland, entered the country on the eastern front on September
17, beginning the strange alliance between Germany and Soviet Russia that lasted until
1941 (Davies, 2005b). Poland, though never officially surrendering, lay trapped between
two dictators, slowly crushed from without and within.
The Camps
Perhaps Hitler decided that the Army of the Third Reich would not be up for the
task of social and physical devastation, so Heinrich Himmler and the SS were given the
35
job of waging war against the Jews and the Poles, and were eventually responsible for
implementing the Final Solution in Poland. Himmler echoed Hitler’s vehement antiPolonism with these words, proclaiming that “all Poles will disappear from the world…It
is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all
Poles” (Lukas, 1986, p. 4). The first step in this cleansing campaign was to make room
for the German colonists by way of massive deportations that uprooted thousands upon
thousands of Poles from the countryside of Western Poland. Transit camps sprang up,
siphoning entire villages and towns into a few square feet of barbed wire encampment,
though the German authorities quickly realized that these camps, black holes of
skyrocketing mortality and appalling conditions, were only a temporary solution for their
national mandate. Long-term concentration camps began to appear throughout the Polish
countryside on land once dedicated to potato and grain crops, now plowed to bare dirt,
packed by the feet of thousands—millions—who occupied the camps from 1940 to 1944.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous concentration camp in the south of the
country, began as a prison for Polish political prisoners, established in the year following
the initial invasion, but quickly degenerated to its current status as the most infamous of
Nazi death camps, though it was only one cog in the Nazi death industry. Nearly two
thousand concentration camps that networked the Polish countryside and seven camps
built for the primary task of extermination fueled mass deportations from the entire
Central European continent (Davies, 2005b). Deportations in Poland continued into 1943,
as the Germans emptied towns into dirt pits, dug by the victims themselves, or packed the
36
residents into train cars bound for gas chambers and the work that would ultimately lead
to the freedom of death. Many Poles attempted to escape the Nazis by running into the
forests and woods, often burning their homes and possessions so that they would not fall
into the hands of the army of incoming German colonists (Lukas, 1986).
In this short space and survey of Polish history, it is impossible to detail the extent
of Nazi crimes against the Polish people. Even population numbers, common in history
textbooks, cannot convey the sheer losses that this country experienced during the war.
The dull parade of statistics is marched past the disconnected reader, in numbers that are
impossible to imagine or even connect to reality. Photographs published during the
Nuremburg Trials that effected such outrage in the late forties have become
commonplace in textbooks and films, and perhaps we have become numb to the images
of living skeletons, mass graves, twin children who served as medical guinea pigs
walking hand-and-hand to freedom outside the mocking gates of Auschwitz. But this was
reality in post-war Poland, and the statistics, are still disturbing: an estimated 22 percent
of the population died, trailing only the Soviet Union, China, and Germany in sheer
losses (Lukas, 1986, p. 38).
And Poland has not forgotten the 6,028,000 dead, 5,384,000 of whom were
civilians liquidated by Nazi and Soviet forces during the course of six years, a number
split 50-50 between Polish Christians and Polish Jews (Lukas, 1986, p. 38-39).
Liquidated—as one liquidates superfluous stock, not human lives, is the term used today
by the soft-spoken guides at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, in place
even of words like “murdered” or “massacred.” This grave of 1.1 million (Gutman &
37
Berenbaum, 1998) is a shrine to human depravity, a place where tragedy beyond
comprehension is on display for the world, including those who deny the existence of the
Holocaust against the Jews and the Poles, to comprehend. On a summer day in
Auschwitz, today, with blue sky a calming dome above and the sound of the wind
wafting through the trees, it becomes glaringly obvious that the Poles have not, and
perhaps cannot, forget.
Uprising
While the camps converted Jews, Poles, and other unwanteds to crematoria
smoke, an exiled government in London, governed by General Władysław Sikorski,
succeeded in combining nearly all Polish resistance factions into one group, the Armia
Krajowa, or Home Army, often shortened to AK. In a nation where education was
outlawed and Polish culture suppressed, the AK served as the “backbone of a veritable
underground state,” combating Nazi dominance with sabotage and acts of violence, along
with attempting to resuscitate Polish morale with underground schools and cultural
activities (Pease, 1994, p. 37). Further, they carried out intelligence-gathering missions
that provided the Allies with essential information, even helping to provide the British
Secret Service with intelligence concerning the existence of the Enigma, the Nazi coding
machine whose capture would play an essential role in bringing down the Nazi state
(Pease, 1994; Bloch, 1982). At home in the major cities, the Poles again mobilized
against the invading forces, reliving the roles of their grandparents during the partitions,
and creating the most effective underground movement of World War II.
38
Within the walls of the Jewish ghettos, tight areas of Poland’s largest cities
compact with Jews before deportation to such camps as Auschwitz and Treblinka, a
similar spirit of defiance swelled. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Jewish inhabitants rose up
against the army forces mandating deportations, and with a well-planned insurgency
armed and aided by the AK, the estimated 2,000 fighters managed to hold off the Nazis
from within the ghetto for a few weeks in 1943. Repercussions were severe: the 60,000
Jews residing in the ghetto before the uprising were packed into trains to Treblinka, their
fate already sealed (Lukas, 1986, p. 178).
Over a year later, with the ghetto razed to the ground, the rest of the city rose in
an impressive show of solidarity against the Nazi forces: the Warsaw Uprising, instigated
and lead by the Home Army. Called Operation Tempest, the rebellion covered the entire
nation and was directed by General Tadeusz Komorowski, codenamed Bór, who acted on
commands from the London government-in-exile. Poorly equipped fighters in borrowed
uniforms attacked various German units throughout the country, in a fight that lasted 63
days before brutal crushing by the Nazi forces (Lukas, 1986). Heroic despite defeat, the
Poles demonstrated their revolutionary sensibilities and their ability to come together in
an amazing showing of national solidarity. The consequences, however, were tragic. In
Warsaw alone, some 200,000 perished (Kemp-Welch, 2008, p. 5).
In retaliation to the Rising, Hitler ordered that “Warsaw will be wiped out,” a last
act of spite against the Poles (Lukas, 1986, p. 179). Grainy films from the area,
propaganda pieces meant to encourage the German people that the good work was still
being done, show Vernichtungskommando units, or destruction squads, armed with flame
39
throwers hurling fiery columns through buildings that had miraculously survived the
Luftwaffe’s pounding campaigns. The Warsaw Castle, a long, coral-colored building that
better resembles a university than a stronghold of kings, had been crippled during the
initial Nazi invasion. In order to further demoralize the Poles, this symbol of regal Poland
was imploded from within on direct orders from Hitler. Following the initial 1939
invasion, the German army wired the castle with explosives, ready to blow at any
moment. Five years after invasion, following the Rising, Hitler made good on his threat
and destroyed the castle, spitting at the Polish adage that claimed “as long as the Warsaw
Castle stands, Poland is not yet lost” (Berge, Cohen, Edsel, & Newnham, and Berge,
Cohen, & Newnham, 2006). Still, Poland was not lost.
In the years following the Nazi surrender, Warsaw was rebuilt, brick by brick.
The city, once an ash desert due to two months of fires in 1944, grew back as far cry from
its original splendor, now a radically different proletariat paradise of dull colors and wide
streets. Today the evidence of Nazi domination is gone and only the memorials and
plaques remain, on any given day marked with the carnation wreaths threaded with white
and red ribbons. The Insurgents Memorial at Krasiński Square depicts homegrown
fighters, in the rag-tag uniform of resistance, creeping forth from a brick barricade, the
walls and the people scarred by Vernichtungskommando destruction. Only two streets
away, past the glorious façade of the Krasiński Palace, is the place where West German
Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt in penitence in 1970, in front of the Ghetto Victims
Memorial, a doorway of people, crowded together and gazing of into the distance
40
(Kaplan, 1993). Of the war that ripped Poland apart, this is what remains: memorials and
memories, the cruel inheritance that is still understood today.
At the end of the war, when Hitler died in his bunker and Nazi children recast as
soldiers waved white flags, three men in the Livadia Palace in Yalta wrote Poland's fate
(Kemp-Welch, 2008). Stalin, already the oracle of Poland’s future with his own vision in
mind, agreed with Churchill and a fading Roosevelt that free elections must occur in the
nation, though it proved to be a false treatise. A second conference in Potsdam, with
Truman replacing Roosevelt, shifted Polish borders to their current incarnation, a move
that displaced Germans, Poles, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians as each group
was relocated to the “proper” side of the borders. That year, England and the U.S. offered
hesitant approval for a communist government in Poland, now the People’s Republic of
Poland (PRP), due in part to the strategic position that the Red Army had taken up in the
country. An overwhelming majority of the Poles opposed this move, which effectively
severed all ties to the West and incorporated them into the Soviet sphere. Poland, once a
bridge between Eastern Slav and Western Catholic, was now distinctly Soviet, modeled
after the USSR itself. For fifty years, the People’s Republic of Poland, remotely guided
from Moscow, labored under socialism, until the Polish economy caved and dissent from
the intelligentsia, the working class, and ultimately the church, finally acknowledged by
the Vatican, cracked the communist Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZNP) hold
(Pease, 1994).
41
Cold War Poland
Just as with Poland under German control, the atrocities committed by the Soviet
Union are well known and need not be recounted in great detail. Though the people of
Poland did not suffer the same atrocities leveled against the people of the USSR, the
crimes committed by the ruling faction were still heinous. The Big Brother system of
security was quickly implemented, censoring the press and keeping one eye at all times
on the movements of the general population. This group, the Ministry of Public Security
(Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego or MBP in Polish) engaged the tactics of
Soviet paranoia: nighttime arrests of dissidents, questioning coupled with torture, and a
blatant, systematic attack on the Catholic Church. Thousands were targeted in the postwar purges, including priests, intellectuals, ex-AK resistance fighters, and those swearing
allegiance to any other political party (Davies, 2005b). Poland was under direct Soviet
control, forced to worship the new god of Stalin, whose defiant figure sprang up around
the country, both in name and face as the title of squares and streets, or on blocks as
menacing statues. He even “gifted” to the Polish people an august skyscraper, a
monstrosity in the Soviet Classicalist style: the Palace of Culture, Pałac Kultury i Nauki,
a pile of sharp rectangles impossibly different from the reemerging Stare Miasto. Labeled
a “grotesque wedding cake,” the building towered above the rest of the city, a fitting
reminder of the giant who controlled Poland’s post-war years (Zaborowska, 1999).
Stalin’s oppressive reign as magnate of the Soviet Bloc did not end until his death
in 1953, and even three years after that Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (2007)
recalled a seatmate on a flight from Moscow, swallowed by a cheap suit, one of the
42
remnant still emerging from the Siberian gulags. In 1956, following Stalin’s death and
Nikita Khrushchev’s subsequent anti-Stalin campaign, workers rioting in the streets of
Poznań met with military resistance, resulting in 73 dead and hundreds injured (KempWelch, 2008). The PZPR’s elected secretary, Władysław Gomułka, pledged to follow “a
Polish road to socialism” in a demonstration of a loyalty to Moscow, in part to win
Khrushchev’s confidence that Poland did not require the intervention of the Red Army
(Pease, 1994). This “Polish October” proved that Poland was not taking well to
communism, but despite mounting resistance, the end was nowhere in sight.
The next twenty years were marked with economic reforms that failed to produce
significant results, as dissenting voices increased in volume, both from inside and outside
of the country. A country that quietly celebrated its democratic attempts was now saddled
with an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that combed through newsprint and every other
printed word for any criticism of either the Soviet or PRP system. Goods were in short
supply, with a majority of raw materials flowing from the USSR, and the collective
system of communism, combined with years of foreign rule, crippled productivity. Poor
railroads and even poorer roads, lamented by Poles even today, crisscrossed the country
in an era when the horse and carriage were more common to the rural family than a car. It
is Davies (2005b), the award-wining Polish historian, who best captures Cold-War
Poland in his laundry list of Polish problems:
Alcoholism, bad drains, long queues, peeling plaster, overcrowded homes and
buses, polluted air, heavy falls of soot and chemical dust, unmade pavements,
43
sub-standard service, endless delays and arguments with petty officials, all had to
be accepted as part of everyday life (p. 451).
The military and its spending rose to unheard of amounts as the rest of the population
sunk deeper into a lower standard of living.
From this depressed and sooty nation came a glimmer of hope in 1978 as Cardinal
Karol Wojtyła, the beloved Archbishop of Kraków, was elected Pope of the Roman
Catholic Church in a puff of white smoke from a Vatican chimney. Now called John Paul
II with the pointed mitre atop his head, this humanist who had survived World War II
preached a message of hope, choosing to dwell on love, faith, and forgiveness, tenants of
a pure Christian faith (Davies, 2005b).
After centuries of humilitation, a Pole now sat in the holiest of holies, only a step
away from God himself to intercede on behalf of his nation, a fitting tribute to a
millineium of Polish piety. The pride, as one can imagine, swelled to incredible levels as
the Pope made his first visit home a year after the election. In an unprecedented show of
respect and adoration for the new pontiff, an estimated thirty million streamed into
Kraków and Warsaw to catch a glimpse. Even communism revoked its atheism for a
week as a wood cross, left over from the assembly, remained in Warsaw’s Victory
Square. Then it all came down—all signs of religion, of God—as those in power
attempted a return to pre-1978 Poland (Davies, 2005b). This was now impossible.
44
Solidarity
By 1976, democratic tensions were beginning to boil, especially in respect to
workers’ rights, starting with the formation of the intellectual Committee for the Defense
of Workers (Komitet Obrony Robotników or KOR) and the student group Committee for
Student Solidarity. As Edward Gierek, the PZPR chief, caved under pressure, slow
liberalizations began to occur given the pressure of these groups and the emergence of an
energetic underground press. But in 1980, government-mandated food prices spiked and
tensions broke as a group at Gdańsk’s Lenin Shipyard ground to a halt on strike, lead by
veteran union man Lech Wałęsa. This group, later developing into the national trade
union called Solidarity, called for a union independent of the ruling communists in order
to protect the rights of the worker. Overwhelming popular support settled the question for
the authorities, and on August 31, a contract ensured the birth of Solidarity and the
beginning of the end of the communist rule (Davies, 2005b). Solidarity was a first for the
Soviet Bloc, and spread past the ranks of shipbuilders and dockworkers to later include
10 million people, or one in every four Poles (Pease, 1994, p. 46).
The Solidarity battle, its rank and file of Poles from every walk of life, quickly
expanded to take on a new cause: reforming the entire system in order to eventually
remove the communists. The union received vital encouragement and support from the
Vatican, giving the movement the legitimicy needed to shake the entire country (Pease,
1994). Over in Moscow, the Soviet Russians fought hard against the existance of
Solidarity, fearing that this social movement would spread throughout the Warsaw Pact
countries and make quick work of the other communist nations.
45
In 1981, liberal-leaning party leader Stanisław Kania was ousted by General
Wojciech Jaruzelski, who towed a more militant line. Negotations ceased by the end of
the year, and the country seemed poised for tumult as Jaruzelski declared marital law in
1981 and staged a coup against the reigning PZPR, for reasons explained only as possibly
heading off “the greater evil of an imminent Soviet invasion” (Pease, 1994, p. 47). In
maneuvers that resembled the tactics of both Nazi and Stalin-era terror, he closed
universities, arrested thousands of Solidarity members, and imposed drastic restrictions
on civil rights. He declared Solidarity dissolved, in an attempt to erase the past months of
progress, and allowed martial law to remain in place until July of 1983.
Despite intense persecution, Solidarity rose again in the underground, an effort
that received further global attention in 1983 when Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace
Prize. Similar efforts across the Eastern Bloc ensured a full-scale weakening of Soviet
power, coupled with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev‘s liberalizing efforts of glastnost
and peristroika. By 1989, when country-wide strikes shook the PZPR hold, roundtable
talks provided a bloodless, peaceful compromise: Solidarity would once again be a legal
poltical entity and a free election would decide the reprentatives for parliament, the Sejm.
By 1990, the PZPR held its final session of congress and retired to the pages of history,
the Byzantine system of communism replaced by democracy and free market economy
(Pease, 1994). With Tadeusz Masowiecki as prime minister and the triumphant Lech
Wałęsa as president, Poland entered the final decade of the twentieth century as the Third
Polish Republic. But the communist legacy was a bitter one, resulting in the “collapse of
a 200-year-old symbolic and romantic culture that was very important for the subversion
46
of totalitarianism” (Walat, 2006, p. 167). Poland next had the task of repairing not only
their nation and economy following the resistance movements and breadlines of the
1980s, but cultivating a national identity and pride in a newly formed democracy at a
time when the France, Germany, and the rest of the continent were consolidating their
power in the form of the European Union.
The Third Republic
As an independent democracy, Poland’s road to free market economy was
surprisingly gentle, especially when compared to the conflicts that rocked the Balkans
and the other ex-communist nations of the Eastern Bloc. By 1995, the foreign debt
accumulated in the 1970s was fully paid off, productivity increased, and since, the
national currency, the złoty, has held stable and remains a strong non-Euro currency
(Davies 2005b).
In an effort to further join itself to the west, Poland was accepted into NATO in
1999 with the Czech Republic and Hungary and voted to join the European Union in
2003. On the eve of the official date of acceptance into the EU in 2004, after
“cantankerous” discussions back and forth in negotiations, journalist Traynor (2004)
noted that Poland “is not inclined to surrender too much too soon, and will be a difficult
and feisty partner in the new Europe.” And so much has been proven true, resulting in
several high-profile political conflicts with Germany, a country that once occupied
Poland and has risen again to be the most powerful economic force in Europe.
47
The Polish government expressed outrage at a 2006 article in the German
newspaper Der Spiegel referring to Auschwitz-Birkenau as the “Polish death camp,” a
lexical error whose ongoing persistence has confounded the Polish people. Though the
media outlet argued that the term was used as a point of geographic reference not an
assignment of blame on the responsible party, the Polish government balked, stating that
they found excessive insult in any insinuation that the responsibility for the genocide,
which claimed several million Poles, could be Polish (“Poland seeks Auschwitz
renaming,” 2006). Der Spiegel’s phrasing, along with a number of similar events in world
media outlets prompted the Polish government to lobby UNESCO for a name change.
Thus, in 2007, the death camp was officially branded as the “former Nazi German
concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau” (Tran, 2007).
Further, two years earlier in September of 2004, Polish Sejm members wrote a
resolution demanding reparations from Germany for the destruction of World War II,
claiming that those given in 1945 at Potsdam were insufficient (“Poland rejects
reparations call,” 2004). Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka closed the door on this and
any future demands, effectively silencing the issue of German reparations. In 2006,
however, relatives of the 2.5 million Germans who were displaced with the border shifts
also decided at Potsdam, made reparation claims of their own, demanding compensation
for forfeited property. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Polish Prime Minister
Jarosław Kaczynski met to discuss the issue, with Kaczynski putting forth a measure that
would end reparation calls on both sides. Merkel’s answered with a flat-out “no,” also
giving support for the Polish-opposed gas pipeline from Russia. Poland, forever wary of
48
Russia, warned Merkel and the other EU states of the dangers of using Russia to supply
all of the continent’s energy and gas needs (“Kaczynski demands World War II
reparations deal,” 2006).
Obvious from this stance, ties with Russia, converted itself to a more democratic
system in 1991, have remained strained, especially with the election of Vladimir Putin,
whose ex-KGB background and imperialist ideals marked Russia’s openly combative
stance in world politics. This tension has been further exacerbated in summer of 2008,
when Russia invaded Georgia and Polish politicians erupted in protest. One cannot help
but see the connection between Russia’s aggressive move on the weaker, ex-satellite
Georgia and Poland’s decision to sign a treaty with the U.S. for the creation of a strategic
missile defense system on Polish soil. While the EU balked at this move, Poland accepted
ten Interceptor missiles as a way of strengthening Polish defenses, in word against Iran
but most likely meant as a first line of defense against Russian action (Easton, 2008). In
retaliation, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the shipment of short-ranged
Iskander missiles to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, which borders Poland on
the Baltic Coast, supposedly to “neutralize” any planned U.S. missile system (“Russia to
move missiles to the Baltic,” 2008).
In these recent events, it is clear the Poland is placing less faith in the workings of
the European Union, taking on its age-old role of independent underground fighter in
order to uphold its own culture and preserve its way of life. This nationalistic attitude
reaches outside of the political and historical realm, since the attitude of autonomy that is
49
displayed by Poles has ramifications for all aspects of Polish life, including language
learning.
50
Chapter 5
LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM
The unique, painful history of Poland is told in the mournful strains and string
crescendos of Górecki’s symphonies written as Holocaust memorials and the melancholy
guilt of the poet Miłosz’s Christian standing with his eyes trained on the Jewish ghetto,
the inhabitants of which had been emptied into mass graves. During the pre-twentieth
century partitions when underground politics raged against invading powers, and again in
the twentieth century with the rise of resistance movements, Polish history, often
combined with myth and legend, was told by writers, not historians. Free Poland,
something of a promised land or a “pipe-dream” (Davies, 2005b, p. 5) not fully realized
until the elections of 1989, relies on a chronology full of the romantic ramblings of
revolutionaries who envision their nation, when free, as a mirror of Augustine’s City of
God at the heart of which “lies a dream of the past, a dream nourished by emotions,
protected by lives, paid for in terms of exile, torture, and death” (Bloch, 1982, p. 7).
Forever looking back, or forced to look back, Poland’s fierce nationalism has developed
through her history. While Western Europe and America have “progressed” beyond
nationalism, or so liberal pundits would have us believe, nationalism still plays an
essential role in the politics, and by association, the culture of Central and Eastern
European nations.
For any discussion of nationalism, a brief definition of terms involved is
necessary. Today, “nationalism” conveys a pejorative message, almost a supremacist
51
message that one’s nation, a “selfish, irrational, and disruptive” organization, is
predominant (Davies, 2005b, p. 3). To the West, nationalism is synonymous with
regressive thought, an obstacle on the road to a peaceful, tolerant world. Eastern Europe,
especially, does not share this understanding of nationalism. To the Eastern-centric
Europe, long dominated by the empires of the Kremlin, political struggle has been
centered around power and proving oneself as an independent and thus worthy of the
God-given right to self-governance. Here, unthinkable to the West, there is “no
contradiction between Nationalism and Democracy” as Eastern Europe prefers instead
“to view the one as the natural guarantor of the other” (p. 4). Without nationalism, there
would be no Lithuania, no Latvia, no Bulgaria, no Serbia. The Eastern Bloc would still be
cloaked in the stifling blanket of gray, the “living death of communism” (Kaplan. 1993,
p. 287). This view of nationalism, hardly accepted by Western Europe, has complicated
the East’s integration into the European Union.
In 2004, Poland was accepted into the EU along with Hungary and Slovakia as
the first ex-communist nations to enter the Western-based, liberal association of nations.
The German sociology journal, Berliner Journal fuer Soziologie, reported that the people
of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia mounted resistance to the move, some fearing that the
liberalism would have a “potentially negative influence” and convert the traditional,
culturally-saturated societies of the three nations to a “western materialistic, consumer
oriented, capitalistic and secular civilization” (Wagner, 2003, p. 192). Nationalism, after
all, was the reason for the many celebrations of the early nineties, since it served to both
unite and mobilize individuals to fight for liberation from the communist system. Thus,
52
we cannot imagine Central and Eastern Europe without nationalism, and we must come
to an understanding of the ideal that they hold so dear.
Whatever the perceived understanding of nationalism, colored by one’s own
philosophy, nationalism itself is “neither virtuous or vicious” (Davies, 2005b, p. 4). In the
most basic terms, nationalism “represents a belief in an ethnic culture and linguistic
connection within a grouping, and their belief both in their right and ability to govern
themselves” (Millar, 2005, p. 28). This view, arguably a very neutral definition, casts
nationalism as almost a basic human need: we, as people, need to belong to something.
Nationalism is nearly impossible to quantify, often developed through literature that
draws upon people’s emotional reactions “without adequate empirical data to support it”
possibly because there exists no passable tool with which to measure it (Dekker, H.,
Malova, D. & Hoogendoorn, S., 2003, p. 346). How do you measure a feeling, something
so ingrained in your being that often you don't even realize it exists?
Edwards (1985) explicates the relationship between today’s conception of
nationalism and language, noting that you cannot have one without the other. If
nationalism is the feeling, language is the means of conveyance. Language, after all, is
the daily and “outward sign of a group’s peculiar identity and a significant means of
ensuring its continuation” (Kedourie, 1961, p.71). The relationship between language and
nationalism, Edwards (1985) explains, emerged from German romantic thought in the
late nineteenth century, and made its way across the continent. Johannes Gottfried
Herder, a German philosopher of the era who published a definitive paper on the subject,
stressed the bond between language and a common group, and stated that this group or
53
speech community will “only survive as discrete entities so long as they preserve their
language as a collective inheritance” (Edwards, 1985, p. 23). For German nationalists,
Herder’s Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache became a definitive text, a vehicle for antiFrench sentiment, able to develop a common nationality based on the existence of a hated
French “out-group.” Language, hardly unique to the German cause, is the medium that
stores a nation’s soul, Herder explained, and even “the smallest of nations…cherishes in
and through its language the history, the poetry and songs about the great deeds of their
forefathers” (p. 24).
Even Stalin knew that by forcing Russian upon non-Russian inhabitants in Soviet
satellite states, perfect examples of Herder’s “smallest of nations,” would only encourage
resentment for the USSR, a phenomenon evidenced in Poland during the partitions when
German and Russian were forced upon Polish-speaking inhabitants. Instead of following
the earlier model, Stalin assumed that the other states would eventually adopt the Russian
language based on its economic viability (Goodman, 1956). Thus, the Soviet government
embraced a policy that essentially rewrote history and shaped culture as to connect
socialism to the Russian language and extenuate socialist values, a move that would limit
nationalism as the citizens of a state would understand their own country’s supposed link
to the Kremlin and the communist government. Russia, and by extension the Russian
people and language, was the home and keeper of socialism, and thus the decider of a
comrade’s identity and loyalty. Regardless of these purported ideals, forced Russification
still occurred in the years before Stalin’s demise. Ukraine, for example, spoke two
languages as of the 1930s, with Ukrainian Russian dominate in urban areas and Ukrainian
54
in the farmland. Ukrainian, obviously, was subverted through governmental pressure and
use of the “home” language targeted one as strange looking and stupid.
In a more obvious political move, the Soviet government, in an effort to instill in
non-Russian minorities a commitment to the Soviet cause and by association, the Russian
language, took great care in the southern Volga-Tartar region to create distinctions
between the dialects spoken by the Tartar and Bashkir Muslims. This essentially
“elevated dialects into languages” and these languages, spoken by ethnic groups who,
before the Red Revolution, had no access to education, were allowed to continue without
written alphabets or, despite the obvious connections to Arabic, with an alphabet only in
Cyrillic form (Goodman, 1956, p. 90). Thus Russian became the spoken and written
language of this block of minorities, as the common tongue that both the Tartars and the
Bashkirs could speak with each other, preventing a minority uprising based in their
related native languages. The Soviets knew, as historians and researchers have alleged for
centuries, that nationalism and language are inexplicably linked, and a person’s sense of
nationality is often understood through their language.
Now broken into the autonomous states of Central Asia and Eastern Europe,
countries such as Kazakhstan and Ukraine display a marked brand of political ethnonationalism and claim the right to an “ethnic state” free to protect its language and
national culture from dominance by a group perceived to be different from their own
(Miscevic, 1999). Claims of nationalism, and the importance of a state’s nationality, are
thus directed at neighbors who might share some cultural similarities in order to distance
themselves, especially from a neighbor such as ex-Soviet Russia who once dominated
55
minority life. These claims are often “explicitly oriented towards, very often close,
sometimes very close neighbors” (p. 114). For this reason, the Croatian government
passed regulations in the late nineties prohibiting alliances with other Balkan nations, and
nations such as Poland have take great steps to protect their language and culture from
outside, especially neighboring, influences. Branded “the Hated Neighbor Truism,” one
needs to look no further than the Balkans and their complex web of relationships that pit
Serb against Croat for evidence of this theory (p. 110). And this truism is an easy
explanation for Poland, another reason for present-day nationalism and the desire for
language protection. Language, Edwards (1984) claims, is a nation’s treasure.
Researchers today are left to wonder whether this elevation of a nation’s own language
will lead to rejection of others, even those language presented in a neutral classroom
context, as in second language instruction.
Language: Communicative and Symbolic
Due in part to the exuberant colonial efforts of the British, who created the iconic
nineteenth-century empire on which the sun did not set, English is the official language
of at least forty-four countries (Bhatt, 2001, p. 531) in one count, countries as widely
different in culture, religion, and government as the United Kingdom, Brunei, India,
Trinidad and Tobago, and the Philippines. But for most English-speakers, language as an
identity can be difficult to grasp, when ownership of a mother tongue is shared with such
vastly different groups of people.
56
English, after all, boasts 380 million speakers scattered throughout the globe
(Bragg, 2003, p. 288). And while a majority of Americans still cite English as their first
(or only) language, we feel no kinship to New Zealanders, for example, based on native
tongue. Though Mandarin Chinese, with more than a billion speakers, exhibits the largest
language group in terms of population, you won’t find Chinese characters on the signs at
Hosea Kutako International Airport in Windhoek, Namibia. You will find only English.
The language of colonists and MTV enjoys worldwide dominance, and functions as a tool
for communication and operation, necessary “to buy and sell, to enjoy and participate, to
sing and be heard” (p. 288). English borrows words and evolves, functioning as the
linguistic equivalent of the American melting pot.
When a globally transcendent language such as English, is faced with a smaller,
almost “minority” language such as Polish that has not been spread throughout the world
with the smoking gun of colonialism, one can see the dual nature of language, as both
communicative and symbolic. Edwards (1985) understands English as an international
language, used as a way to communicate for business or pleasure around the world, a far
cry from languages such as Polish, which also serve as a symbolic language or “an
emblem of groupness, as a symbol, a rallying point” (p. 17). The symbolic function of
language, as “the interweaving of language and culture which depends upon the fusion of
pragmatic linguistic skills and the more intangible associations carried by language,” is
often a difficult concept to understand for those outside of its ranks (p. 17). Though
Edwards cites the examples of fourth-generation Polish-Americans and Irish as a
language in Ireland as instances in which language can function in both the
57
communication and symbolic aspects, they are “separable—even if they are usually
joined” and this distinction between to the two must be understood in avoid “misdirection
of effort among linguistic nationalists” (p. 18).
Polish certainly serves both purposes as a language. As an Indo-European, WestSlavic language related closest to Slovak and Czech (Deutscher, 2005, p. 57), it is spoken
by the 40 million inhabitants of Poland and approximately 10-15 million Poles living
outside of the country, with the largest groups residing in the United States and Canada, a
combined seven million (Chłopicki, 2003, p. 108). It is one of the twenty-three officially
recognized languages of the European Union (2008) though the European Commission,
the executive branch of the EU, conducts its business only in German, French, and
English, exacerbating some public outcry that these strong (even colonial) languages
“propagate linguistic and cultural uniformity” and thus exert control over the twenty
other, “weaker” languages (Macdeo, Dendrinos, & Panayota, 2003, p. 45). To its own
neighbors, and its European Union counterparts, Polish is still a minority language. As a
result, for the protection of the language, the Polish government passed the Polish
Language Act in anticipation of “the increased influence of foreign languages in areas
such as official communication” (Chłopicki, 2003, p. 108). History has created an
environment that causes Poles to “reject on principal any foreign dominance in economic,
cultural, and political life,” and naturally, this extends to language as well (Wagner, 2003,
p. 194).
Nationalism, in an attempt to quantify that social and personal phenomenon, has
been the subject of several research studies focused on the ex-Eastern Bloc: Poland,
58
Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Weiss (2003) used surveys to compare the
four nations with Austria, finding that 78% of those surveyed in Poland feel it is of the
utmost importance to “honor the national history and its heritage” (p. 386). Further, 84%
agreed that “they feel safest when their own people represent the majority” (p. 388), an
attitude developed from years of foreign rule thus paramount and a point of contention in
the 2004 entrance to the EU and subsequent release of some powers to the EU governing
body. Thus, the Polish Language Act comes as little surprise: by protecting the language,
Poland is protecting a national identity that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and
has since served to unite and protect, demonstrating that they will not give up so much to
be part of a larger European body.
The Polish Nationality
In linguistic studies, ethnocentrism like nationalism has become a buzzword with
derogatory connotations: namely, “the extent to which an individual perceives his group
as superior and outgroups as inferior” (Gardner & Smythe, 1976, p. 10). History has
taught Poland that it is not superior, in terms of military strength or even defensive
strategy, but Poles have a clear connection to their country and a love of the land that has
been so often taken from them. Polish nationalism, thus, could be defined as a reliance on
and respect for a collective, cultural memory that leads to a society committed to “the
preservation of national and cultural peculiarity” (Wagner, 2003, p. 194). Poland, in
short, is focused on survival.
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The nineteenth century, when Poland was partitioned between Austria, Prussia,
and Russia, marks the era when Polish, as a national identity, developed to encompass all
native inhabitants in the geographic region once identified as Poland, bound together by
common religion—Catholicism—and language. Prior to the 1795 partition in the heyday
of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, only ten percent of the country represented by
the noble szlachta, exhibited a commitment to the preservation of Polish culture. Their
purpose, Coleman (1934) notes, “was to rule, to maintain its God-given supremacy, and
preserve its ‘golden freedom, even at the expense of the State” (p. 155). However, after
partition, when language became the means of separating Pole from Russian, Prussian, or
Austrian, this identity spread throughout all the social classes. A heroic tradition with a
veritable pantheon of historic figures emerged, their tales told to children in the language
of Polish, not the language of their conquers. Following 1795, “the Polish language
became a means of creating a glittering galaxy of national heroes and giving them to the
whole people” (p. 163), joining the previously divided gentry and peasantry so that “the
heart of prince and peasant alike began to beat with pride in the same heroic tradition” (p.
164). Paradoxically, the Polish people were born just as their state began to decay.
Ideals that had some sway during periods of independence are worshipped during
times of trial, and there is no greater example of this than the nationalistic, almost
messianic writings of Adam Mickiewicz, whose voice was used as a force for demanding
liberation during the partitions (Mills, 1956). The poet, as a part of a nationalistic student
group that rallied against the Russian Tsarist attempts to replace Polish culture and
language with its own, was exiled to Paris (Coleman, 1934, p. 164). There, he
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commanded biblical authority when he wrote Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa
polskiego, or Books of the Polish Nation and It’s Pilgrimage, echoing the cadence of the
Gospel of John by recasting the famous first verse as “in the beginning, there was belief
in one God, and there was freedom in the world.” Poland, in this imagined myth,
functions as a symbol and hope for the downtrodden, proclaiming to the world with
language similar to that of Jesus Christ, that “whosoever will come to me shall be free
and equal, for I am Freedom” (Davies, 2005b, p. 7). Though envisaged through the
quixotic rose lens that comes with the passage of time, Mickiewicz’s impassioned cry
contains a grain of truth, speaking of the 1791 constitution. Freedom, it seemed, would
not come from Napoleon. Without the support of a foreign government, Polish
revolutionaries assumed that resistance, in violent force, could bring this new dawn that
Mickiewicz so poetically envisioned. The nationalist writings of Mickiewicz served both
in his era and a hundred years later, since his immortal words “employed the Polish
language consciously and purposefully as an instrument for creating a national
consciousness” (Coleman, 1934, p. 165).
During the Cold War, the imagined Poland again emerged, functioning as a light
and hope in the era of dark communism and social contortion. From the 1950s, writers
both at home and in exile spoke with a bittersweetness that pervades both fiction and
nonfiction, displaying a vital connection to their homeland. One example was Ryszard
Kapuściński, admittedly confused about his nationality due to the shifting borders of
Poland-Lithuania that followed World War Two, who often dwelt on his own identity
when covering wars and insurrections in post-colonial Africa and South America. He
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wrote of a campfire discussion in which several Ghanaians ask about his homeland.
“Snow?” Yes, quite a bit of it. “White women?” Yes, and they often lie in the sun so they
will have tanned skin. The Africans found this amusing. They posed another question:
“Colonies?” No, no colonies. But there was war, “the worst colonialism.” Little more was
said about Poland. Later, Kapuściński dwelt on this conversation, his national identity
stirred within:
Suddenly I felt a shame, a sense of having missed the mark. It was not my
countryI had described. Snow and the lack of colonies—that’s accurate enough,
but it is not what we carry around within ourselves; nothing of our pride, of our
life, nothing of what we breathe. (Kapuściński, 1986, p. 233)
After an entire book focused on African and South American politics, Kapuściński ends
with this note, spiraling away from the greater world that he chronicles in his journalistic
efforts and returning to himself, his identity, his nationality, that colors his world and
drives him. He later states in another book, Travels with Herodotus (2007), that language
functions as the most important indicator of a person: “language is one’s identity card,
one’s face and soul, even.” (p. 43). Through language, Polishness is understood, a way to
communicate not only events and history but also personality.
As a result, Polish experience, especially in relation to the Second World War, has
played an essential role throughout their literature. Another writer, Jerzy Kosinski, often
thought to be an anti-nationalist for his disturbing and graphic descriptions of both rural
life and wartime atrocities, demonstrates many themes of Polish literature in his works of
fiction. His national identity finds its root in his native language, as he explained in the
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foreword to his powerful master work, The Painted Bird, that he chose to write the book
in English, not his native language, since “English was still new to me, I could write
dispassionately, free from the emotional connection one’s language always contains”
(Kosinski, 1965, p. xii).
Kapuściński, Kosinski, and Mickiewicz are only three examples of the national
identity, relying on similar themes in their writing that long ago became the roots of
nationalism. After Mickiewicz’s loftiness and the low, dark spirit of Kosinski, it comes as
little surprise that “Poles talk best about themselves through poetry, music, and the arts,
and least well through the stilted language and convoluted prose of professional
historians” (Bloch, 1982, p. 8). History, after all, details one failure after another, while
the arts celebrate, even with solemnity, the abilities and talents of a nation often ignored.
Through this shared experience of misery, chronicled best by artists, the Polish language
becomes the “vehicle of a whole cultural tradition,” and is thus treasured as the means of
conveying nationalism (Coleman, 1934, p. 171).
In places where history has cemented an almost religious attachment to language,
we have to wonder how the people will react to a second language. In the case of Poland,
it is possible to view English and German, two of the most influential languages backed
by two of the most consistently influential countries on the European continent, as a sort
of imperial force, ready to strip away a national identity that is realized through language.
Can we guess, as outsiders, what kind of reaction Poles have to this new form of
imperialism? Is it a way to get ahead, to improve one’s station in life and participate in
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international employment or enjoyment? Or, as a Pole, would I see the increasing
influence of English, German, and Russian as an assault on my identity as a Pole?
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Chapter 6
ATTITUDE AND MOTIVATION IN SECOND LANAGUAGE LEARNING
Every student who crosses the monolingual threshold into the language classroom
comes bearing their native language, already a card-carrying member of a distinct group
or culture, speaking a language of their own that defines so much of the world they know.
Polish students, like other students who enter a second language classroom as product of
a social environment, bring with them the attitudes and prejudices inherited from their
community, tempered by their own personal affective variables. The act of learning a
language departs severely from simply studying the culture of another group. While
learning the history of a country does not involve active participation in the history itself,
second language acquisition requires that the person take on a sliver of new identity. The
second language learner must accept some of that language as his or her own, in order to
successfully communicate, participating in “a deeply social event that requires the
incorporation of a wide range of elements of the L2 culture” (Dörnyei, 2001, p. 46).
When dealing with the social construct of language and studying the attitudinal
and motivational variables that may impact L2 study, theories regarding the variables
themselves abound. Often relying on a similar vein of psychology, researchers have
attempted to understand something of the attitude that drives a person’s motivation and
how a person’s motivation impacts both his language study and his language choice.
Here, we will review these central theories in motivational studies and the major studies
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carried out in order to understand what impact motivation has on a student’s second
language choice.
Defining Motivation
Motivation finds its way into everyday life, understood with variety of different
definitions. The word is thrown around in linguistic, educational, and psychological
circles, often with different understood meanings. Though it appears simple, motivation,
as the “central mental engine or energy-center that subsumes effort, will/want, and taskenjoyment” (Dörnyei, 2001, p. 49), is a highly complex, multifaceted psychological
function that concerns the choice of an action or path, persistance or continuation on that
path, and the actual effort spent in the execution of it (p. 8). “I have no motivation
today!” a student might exclaim as an explanation for laziness. “My motivation for
coming here was to see him” gives the listener a clue as to what influenced the speaker’s
initial choice. Even just the word “motivation” is cause for investigation, as each separate
use could be one of three –or more—definitions. In the psychological field, even the
American Psychological Association nearly removed it from search terms on its database
because the word itself was considered “unspecific” and carried too much meaning to be
of use to researchers (Walker and Symons, 1997).
When combined with learning a second language, the picture of motivation
becomes even more complicated, since it functions both as an educational entity (as a
subject studied in a classroom) and as an event that is linked to social entities, and
functions in an essential role in a social group. Such a sweeping concept carries with it a
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number of challenges that have baffled researchers and should be understood before
whole-heartedly buying into a particular psychologist or linguists’ motivational contruct.
Dörnyei (2001) notes that it is essential to keep in mind that motivation can be either
conscious or unconscious. Though a researcher can look at an individual and attempt to
understand the root or source of an individual’s motivational drive, often the individual is
unaware, or unconscious, or his or her motivational variables. Sorrentino (1996) found
that although conscious thought “helps to define a situation,” motivation eclipses this
definite, self-admissible cognition and “takes over,” meaning that behavior itself can be
the result of unconscious motivation (p. 635). These unconscious behaviors, unknown to
the individual, can directly impact the course of their action, and thus function as an
“unspoken” variable that is noticed through contemplation of the individual’s situation
and actions, not necessarily through his or her own admission.
Further, it is important to consider the distinction between cognition and affect,
the battling sides in the psychological motivation argument. Most researchers align
themselves with the idea that motivation springs from the cognitive aspect, as a direct
result of a person’s thoughts and beliefs, and not stemming, as affect proponents would
argue, from instinct and emotion. To take a definitive side in this conflict, completely
abandoning one line of thought from the other, ignores the complete person as a research
subject. Though, especially when dealing with education and second language learning,
cognition appears to play the most obvious role in deciding a person’s motivation.
However, I put forth and Dörnyei (2001) agrees, to disregard the emotional impact of
experiences of “anger, pride, gratitude, shame, or anxiety” in effect dehumanizes the
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individual (p. 11). Thus, in the studies here explored, both the factors of cognition and
affect will be given credence in order to come to a comprehensive understanding of
collected research in the wide field of motivation.
Motivation and Attitude: Gardner’s Model
Three decades ago, Canadian psychologists Gardner and Lambert (1972) asked a
number of questions in the introduction to their book Attitudes and motivation in secondlanguage learning, the culmination of twelve years of research at McGill University and
the University of Western Ontario. Instead of wondering what aspect of motivation
decided language choice, these pioneers in the field took on a much broader query: “How
is it that some people can learn foreign languages quickly and expertly while others,
given the same opportunities to learn, are complete failures?” (p. 1). They threw out a
few suggestions, quick answers that seem like common sense including teaching style or
the magical “knack” for languages. They conclude that neither answer is sufficient, and
suggest that perhaps a student’s attitudes toward the second language (L2) in question
influence his or her success more than any other factor. This was the beginning of their
socio psychological research, creating Gardner’s Motivation Theory, which states that a
second-language learner, in order to be successful, must be prepared to “adopt various
aspects of behavior which characterize members of the other group,” (p. 3). Further, that
student’s “ethnocentric tendencies” and attitude toward the new group may inhibit his or
her adoption of the vestiges of the second language. The theory appears to be a statement
of the obvious: if I, as an American, display a marked dislike for the French, logic has it
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that my attempt to acquire the French language will be seriously stilted by my prejudice
against the cultural group. Chances are, I will have little motivation to choose the
language in the first place, and even less to continue on a course of diligent study in the
language.
This theory has been questioned throughout the years, and found its most
consistent opposition in the work of MacNamara (1973), who argued that people learn a
language out necessity in a given situation, regardless of their attitude toward the target
language or its cultural group of speakers. Presenting the oft-mentioned Irish as an
example, MacNamara noted that the Irish people, when colonized by the more powerful
British, adopted the English language despite outright disregard for the colonizing power.
Despite negative attitudes, they still adopted English as a method for survival in a new,
English-controlled Ireland.
Children, MacNamara argues, learn language often without understanding the
stereotypes and biases that adults will cite toward another culture. A Canadian child
transplanted in Germany, he offers as another example, will acquire German regardless of
what he or she feels toward or thinks about Germans. Language will be learned because
of necessity—the child needs to communicate—and will not be hinged on his or her
attitude toward Germans and only his or her desire to “fit in” will be considered as
motivation.
Gardner acquiesced in some regard to MacNamara’s considerations, especially
regarding children, the “blank slates” of education, noting the importance of seeing
language within the social sphere and that in certain areas (such as Ireland and the other
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countries colonized by the British), a special case might be present. But in general, when
considering empirical studies, the importance of attitude and motivation are essential to
predicting success in language learning.
Though Gardner and Lambert felt unqualified, and rightfully so, to make an unequivocal
“cause-effect statement” between attitude/motivation and success in language learning,
the data both through their own studies and those of their colleagues in the field, does
“suggest associations that are too consistent, too meaningful, and too potentially useful”
to simply be dismissed (Gardner, 1985, p. 5).
At this, the beginning of their research, Gardner and Lambert were poised to
produce some of the most influential and lasting systems for deconstructing motivation.
As residents of Canada, a nation tied to both English and French history, they were in a
perfect place to study motivation in the L2 field. As a bilingual nation, the Anglophone
and Francophone communities represent two separate entities, almost ethnicities, that
signal a person’s identity. By learning the language of the opposite group, a person could
function as a mediator between the two, a positive force for intercultural communication
and understanding. In the study, they introduced lexical items now standard in
motivational studies: integrative and instrumental.
Gardner’s motivational theory (1985) hinges on motivation and orientation, a
word which he substitutes for “goal,” claiming that these goals or orientations function as
the precursor to the action, the antecedent for beginning language study in the first place,
with instrumental and integrative functioning as the two orientations. Though simple,
these two categories functioned as the catchall for motivation. Any student studying a
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language for pragmatic reasons, such as for a job or because of a language requirement,
was said to exhibit instrumental motivation, reflecting that “more utilitarian value of
linguistic achievement” (Gardner and Lambert, 1972, p. 3). Conversely, those who
exhibited integrative motivation chose to study language for internal purposes, such as
personal edification or to assimilate into another group as a part of their social life. These
two concepts are highly similar to buzzwords used in the field of psychology, labeled by
Deci (1972) as extrinsic and intrinsic, later expanded by Harmer (1983) who noted that
extrinsic motivation, like instrumental motivation, was based around classroom learning
and intrinsic/integrative motivation around factors existing outside of school walls.
Though the words changed, the concepts were still congruent.
Gardner’s (1985) assessment of motivation consisted of three areas, including
intensity of motivation, desire to learn the language, and attitudes toward learning the
language and the language group, as operating within a socio-education model and
functioning as the “three components necessary to describe properly motivation in
language learning” (Tremblay & Gardner, 1995, p. 506). The final component of attitude
toward the target language group plays an enormous role in the study of motivation,
appearing again and again as almost interchangeable with motivation itself. In one model
presented by Gardner (1982), based on his research of French learners in Canada, cultural
beliefs were found to influence attitude toward not only the learning situation, but also
French Canadians themselves, and the manner in which the learners integrated into the
society. All these factors, Gardner claimed, impact student motivation. Again, the
concept of attitude influencing motivation seems like common sense, and Gardner
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rightfully states that “attitudes are clearly influenced by many factors in a student’s
upbringing” (Gardner, 1985, p. 43). As a product of a social environment, students often
act as sponges, soaking up the prejudices, likes, dislikes, and behaviors of a given
community. Attitude could be directed at a specific entity (a teacher, a class, a textbook),
a general entity (a country, a culture), or simply be the product of an overexerted sense of
ethnocentrism, in which the attitude is simply negatively directed toward someone else
but resulting in a sense of personal superiority due to one’s ethnic or national identity.
In their research, Gardner and Lambert (1972) used various student groups across
North America and later in Asia to test their hypothesis that language success was indeed
linked to attitude. In early Canadian research, they subjected groups of English-speaking
students in varied levels to a battery of tests that looked at their aptitude in the French
language and their attitude toward the language and the French-speaking community. As
identified in both the studies of Gardner and Lambert (1972) and Cooper and Fishman
(1977), the dichotomy of instrumental motivation and intrinsic motivation appeared to be
the best way to identify motivation for learning a language. Researchers (such as
Dörnyei, 1994) admit the seductive nature of this model: almost poetic in simplicity, the
one-way-or-the-other approach lends itself beautifully to emperical tests. A test
developed by Gardner and his associates, the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB),
became the benchmark test for assessing attitude and motivation. The test itself has
changed since its early stages (see Gardner, 1985) and it now includes a battery of Likertstyle questions that asks a student to quanitfy their attitude toward a language group,
interest in forigen languages, attitudes toward learning language, classroom anxiety, even
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evaluation of the language teacher. A recent version of the AMTP (Gardner, 2004)
includes 104 statements to which the student must indicate their level of agreeance,
followed by twelve questions that ask the student to rate, on a scale of one to seven, their
perception of congruance with a number of statements. With one (very low) and seven
(very high), students are asked to numerically translate “my desire to learn languages” in
order to both operationalize Gardner’s motivation theory and gauge personal anxiety.
Versions of the test have been used throughout the world, adapted from the original
Canadian model to fit language study situations in Brazil, Croatia, Japan, and beyond. As
of 2001, the test was the only standard exam of second language motivation (Dörnyei,
2001, p. 52). In Gardner and Lambert’s (1972) original test, the two most frequent
predictors of high achievement were positive attitude toward learning French and positive
attitude toward foreign languages overall. Here, it would seem that the research proved
the theory true and test accurate.
In the study, the researchers attempted to take the information garnered in their
Canadian-based research, in a remarkably unusual bilingual environment, and apply it to
other contexts, here, the Philippines and the United States. In the States, the researchers
looked at high-school age native-born American students and French-born FrenchAmerican students in Maine, Louisiana, and Connecticut. First the students were given a
multiple-choice test, a version of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery, which indicated
that most students expressed a positive attitude toward both French speakers and the
French language, demonstrating an integrative form of motivation. However when given
a second test—listening to French and English spoken—they demonstrated “pejorative
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stereotypes…that counteract their favorable attitudes” (Gardner and Lambert, 1972, p.
96). Unbeknownst to the students, the speaker in both the French and English recordings
was the same person, speaking both a Canadian version and a European version of
French and American accented English. The students listened to a language sample then
“graded” the speaker based on their perceived qualities, both physical qualities (height,
good looks) and personality characteristics (leadership, sense of humor, likeability,
reliability, etc.). Though the students expressed favorability toward the French culture in
their first test, the listening portion revealed that the students harbored negative
stereotypes that may have emerged from a community’s bias toward a minority group.
Gardner and Lambert thus suggested that teachers of French would “work at a great
disadvantage in their attempts to teach the language of a people who are thought of in
such negative terms” (p. 104). Since academic success is based on a number of factors,
only one of which is attitude, the researchers wisely did not indicate direct correlations
between the two, but instead revealed that students do approach language-learning
situations with ethnocentric “baggage.”
Using Gardner’s model, Cooper and Fishman (1977) wondered whether Israeli
students, themselves a part of a pseudo-bilingual nation in the outer sphere of English
influence, were motivated by instrumental or integrative tendencies. Within this study,
they interviewed sixty-eight students from Jerusalem High Schools in order to understand
not only their admitted reasons for studying but also their attitudes toward English
speakers (specifically Americans) and the language itself to see if there were any
correlations to achievement. Finally, the researchers questioned the relationship between
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the students’ attitudes and the frequency of their English usage outside of the classroom.
By subjecting the students to interviews, a battery of aptitude tests, and a listening
program with Israeli and American voices (similar to Gardner and Lambert’s earlier
assessments), the researchers arrived at results that, at first glance, appear closely
correlated to those of the Gardner and Lambert subjects.
The language of English itself ranked higher than Hebrew in subjective
evaluations, with students commenting that English, like French, had a beautiful, musical
cadence. Beyond aural aesthetics, the students also viewed English as important to their
future success, tied in rank with Hebrew, and displayed favorable attitudes toward
American English speakers and specifically American immigrants to Israel. However,
through data correlations, Cooper and Fishman concluded that “English operates like an
other academic school subject,” and the students’ attitudes and motivation suggested an
instrumental focus that correlated proficiency and usage (p. 272). Though determined
overall to display instrumental motivation, the researchers did point out that those
students who viewed English acquisition as a personal goal were more likely to both use
the language outside of the classroom and exhibit higher proficiency. Further, they found
a negative correlation between attitude toward the language group and proficiency:
“favorable attitudes toward English and toward native speakers of English are largely
irrelevant with respect to Israelis learning and using English” (p. 272). Israelis, some of
who may have descended from Americans or counted American relatives among their
family members, have little negative “history” with Americans and this seemingly neutral
relationship is evident in that their attitude has little bearing on their learning.
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Brown (1994) too focused on the prevalence of the intrinsic/instrumental
motivational factors, lamenting that too often students are motivated by instrumental
concerns, such as earning high marks in classes or on high-stakes exams. These extrinsic
forces, always a concern in language learning, too often cause students to focus on the
immediate, financial rewards that come from scholastic success. Instrumental motivation,
he argued, did not dictate a path to academic or even whole-person success.
Until the late eighties and early nineties, Gardner’s conclusions were used widely
in the field, though targeted by critics for its complete reliance on the individual and
tendencies to ignore the social environment in which the individual functioned. The
influence of the socio-constructive theories helped widen the motivational theory,
suggesting further categorizations for motivation and placing the motivation process in a
larger sphere as a “socially-negotiated cultural norm” (Bastidas Arteaga, 2006,
“Achievement goals”) that interacts with cognitive development and socio-cultural
environment.
Advancements in Motivational Theory
Since then, the instrumental/integrative model has been dismissed as overly
simplified, even as narrow and restricting by Gardner himself, who underlined the
“dynamic” nature of motivation, when stating that “the old characterization…in terms of
integrative and instrumental orientations is too static and restricted” (Gardner and
MacIntyre, 1993, p. 4). As a result, the theory was expanded (Gardner and Tremblay,
1995) to include factors beyond the standard integrative/instrumental variables that they
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termed “motivational antecedents,” factors that would be difficult for an outsider to
perceive, “but are self-reportable by the actor” (p. 506). As a result, they proposed three
new variables that acted as a connection between attitude and motivation, including
valence, the “desire and attractiveness” of the task itself, since “if language students do
not perceive value in their performance, then their motivation will be lowered” (p. 508).
The second new variable offered was one of “casual attribution” or self-efficacy, which
looked at personal anxiety and expectations for performance. Finally, Tremblay and
Gardner proposed the variable of goal salience, which incorporated the goal-setting
theory of Locke and Latham (1990) to hypothesize that frequent and specific goal setting
will enhance motivation, and as a result, performance.
The concept of goal setting plays heavily in psychological theory regarding
motivation, especially in the area of motivational processing (Heckhausen & Kuhl, 1985)
which looks at the pre- and post- phases of decision-making. The pre-decisional stage,
labeled by Dörnyei (2001) as “choice motivation,” centers around the “complex planning
and goal-setting processes during which the initial wishes and desires are articulated and
evaluated in terms of their desirability and chance of fulfillment” (p. 42). Thus, before
even attempting to learn a language, a person will first evaluate the reasons for that
language—school requirements, personal variables, work experience—and their
following success in that language will be tied to those initial decisions.
But this focus on the individual, both in psychology and as presented in Gardner’s
updated perspective, which operated in a socio-educational model that placed emphasis
on language learning as occurring within a classroom, appeared lacking to some
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researchers who chose instead to view attitude and motivation within a broader, socioethnic context. Canadian psychologist Clément focused on the relationship between
socio-contextual factors and motivation, conducting a number of empirical studies chiefly
concerned with the concept of linguistic self-confidence, which in itself bears a
resemblance to Gardner’s self-efficacy. In a study looking at Canadian French speakers
acquiring English, Clément, Gardner, and Noels (1977) suggested that speakers’
motivation would greatly differ based on the amount of contact, and the quality of that
contact, with the target language group. If the speaker develops desire for future contact
with the group, this will impact their motivation and decide their success in language
learning. “In a multiethnic context,” Clément, Dörnyei, & Noels (1995) later suggested,
“positive attitudes would orient the individuals to seek contact with members of the L2
community,” though still self-confidence in learning that language plays an important
role in their success and is not wholly based on the desire to communicate with the target
group (p. 422).
Clément’s foundation in the socio-cultural context applies especially to
circumstances such as the one analyzed in this paper: what happens when the sociocultural environment presents a negative motivational environment for second language
learning? McGroarty (1998) argued that this consideration was paramount and demanded
further research in the linguistic field, asking to what extent a socio-cultural context will
aid or stilt second/foreign language acquisition. What would be the situation of English
learners in Hong Kong, for example, a country once colonized by England? Or in a
monolingual, monocultural country such as Hungary (Dörnyei, 1994; Dörnyei & Otto,
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1998)? A similar question, currently unanswered in linguistic research, can be asked
regarding the extent to which socio-cultural concerns impact initial second language
choice.
Instead of looking at the micro-perspective of the individual that takes into
account only the perspective of that one person, Clément, Giles and Byrne, Dörnyei, and
numerous others focused on the macro-perspective, understanding the individual through
the scope of their society and culture. Gardner’s research did not focus on the actual
relationship between the groups of English and French speakers and instead investigated
personal attitudes toward members of the other culture, which functioned as the only
representative of social issues. Those studying the macro context attempted to integrate
the self and society, to understand the environment that has an indelible impact on the
individual.
A quick review of macro-perspective theorists demonstrates that the population
groups most observed are minority language populations attempting to integrate into a
majority language group. The work of Giles and Byrne (1982) examined minority groups
attempting to acculturate to majority group settings and hypothesized that motivation is
based on maintaining a person’s self-concept, a positive understanding of who they
represent to themselves, models shared by Schumann’s (1978a, 1978b) acculturation
theory. Schumann, using examples of individuals who relocated to a new nation and
attempted to learn the language, as in a Mexican in the US attempting to learn English,
were either helped or hampered by such factors as how willing they were to “cast off”
some of their original national identity and adopt the new one. Individuals from
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incongruent groups—cultures different in values, traditions, even physical features—
from the new nationality would have more difficulty acculturating, as would individuals
from tightly-knit “in-groups” that formed mini-communities in the midst of the new
national culture. Seeping into the massive theoretical catalog concerned with bilingual
education, we are able to see how this topic of motivation represents a wide and varied
field with connections to nearly every category of educational research.
Regardless of which motivational theorist possess your allegiance, several
statements can be made in relation to the body of research as a whole. Students, as
products of socio-cultural environments, exhibit motivation that is impacted both by
external factors and internal factors, including but not limited to self-confidence, anxiety,
and personal goals. Further, this research has suggested that a student’s attitude toward a
group could have impact on acquiring that group’s language. Overall, one statement can
be made: despite a few naysayers, most researchers agree that motivation is intrinsically
linked to achievement in a language.
But in this quick review of the masses of research available, we must note that it
has failed to explain or even explore the factors that influence the very first step that any
language student takes. We are left to ask what motivates a student to choose a certain
language, to take that very first step toward creating another facet of one’s personality.
This decision is unlike simply selecting a subject in school: though mathematics and
chemistry require great mental exertion, these subjects do not involve the psychological
and social ramifications of adopting another language and, as a result, some fragment of
another group’s culture. The research on cognitive processes, though extensive, does little
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to assist the language classroom teacher in understanding what real, tangible factors will
affect his or her students. By understanding what thought processes and decisions went
into initial language choice, teachers can better understand the course of students’
motivation in the subject.
Poland, as explored extensively in this paper, is a country with a unique historical
and nationalistic situation, the effects of which can be imagined to reach the language
classroom. Nationalism, by definition, links an individual to a population group, and it is
through the experience of that group that the person understands himself or herself. Thus,
research is needed in this area, to understand on a real, concrete level whether the leftover
sentiments of the twentieth century mean much, if anything, to students today. Stepping
away from the cognitive realm that has so fascinated the researchers mentioned in this
chapter, this study seeks to examine these actual, spoken factors that could or do motivate
a student’s initial language choice.
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Chapter 7
SECOND LANGUAGE SELECTION
The American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL) released a
study (Draper & Hicks, 2002) that demonstrated a marked change in U.S. secondary
school foreign language (FL) enrollment trends between 1994 and 2000. Most obviously,
enrollments in certain Indo-European languages, including French and German, had
decreased in favor of non-European, previously untaught languages including Japanese
and Chinese. In what could be perceived as attempts to instill multiculturalism in the US
public education system, classes in Asian and even Indian languages began to appear
more and more frequently, eroding the popularity of the European languages that had
previously had the highest enrollment numbers. Spanish still reigns as the largest
language group, with 48% of FL classes taught, but students now seem to have more
selection for which language to study. Still, there is little understanding as to why a
student selects the language that they do. Statistics abound regarding the languages that
students learn but there is almost no research focused on their rationale for choosing
Japanese, for example, over Spanish.
For some students, like myself, such a decision was based on availability. As a
junior high student, I attended a private Catholic school that offered only Spanish as a
foreign language. I continued to study it in high school so that I would avoid starting over
again with a different language. In college, with one year of language necessary for
graduation, I chose Italian based wholly on my love of Italian food. Friends of mine
picked Japanese because on their addiction to manga comics, German because of their
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heritage, or Russian for its inherent difficulty. But arguably, in the United States, foreign
language study is somewhat voluntary, and frequently serves just to meet a requirement
mandated by the student’s educational institution. CSUS, for example, requires
“proficiency to be demonstrated at a level comparable to the second semester of college
level language” (CSUS Catalog, 2008, p. 77), translating to a year of foreign language
study as a part of the general education requirements. The options are many: as of Fall
2008, CSUS offered first year instruction in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek,
Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, and Spanish. But why do students
select the language that they do? With these options, reasons vary from having a time that
fits into their school schedule, to personal interests, to travel plans, to business goals, to
relationships. Few Americans need a second language to succeed in their work places,
unless they work in the international or cross-cultural sectors. And most Americans are
content as monolinguals.
Poles, on the other hand, begin second language learning by the fourth grade.
English is the most popular language of study, began by an estimated 68% of primary
students (Graves, 2008), and the reasons for selecting this language could be many. An
acquaintance of mine, for example, chose to study English because of the mobility that it
would give him in European society. With English, he was able to study in Stockholm
through the European Union’s Erasmus exchange program. All of his coursework in
Sweden was conducted in English, not Swedish or Polish.
Others, living in the border regions, might choose German or Russian based on
their geographic location, since their knowledge of one language or their other might
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increase their social status or job opportunities. These suppositions, however, are based
on conjecture and result from my own limited knowledge of Polish history and vague
understanding of Polish cultural norms. Conversations with many of my students while in
Poland lead me to believe that nationalistic attitudes persist, and distrust of Western
Europe (especially Germany) and Russia persist, the latter exacerbated by tensions
between Russia and Poland as a result of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and Poland’s
decision to partner with the United States in creating a Central European missile defense
system (Szmigielski & McNulty, 2008; Easton, 2008).
Possible Reasons: Availability, Economics
In a broad overview of second language programs in Polish primary schools,
Niezgoda (2008) notes that since Russian language instruction was once mandatory in
schools two decades ago, there are still great numbers of teaching textbooks and materials
are still available to schools. Since language instruction does not follow a state-governed
curriculum, some schools offer only Russian to their primary students based on the
availability of materials. With this information, we have to wonder about the retention
rates of students studying Russian: do students who begin studying the language in
school because it is the only offered language stay with that language when they proceed
further into academic situations where options are available?
Niezgoda also notes that though the language has suffered an image problem due
to the past three hundred years, but is enjoying a rise in popularity based on its growing
usefulness. Poland, after all, borders the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast along
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with Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine to the east, nations where Russian has historically
been influential. So we must ask, do the economic advantages of studying one language
over another counteract negative feelings toward that language?
English has obvious appeal: as mentioned earlier, it might not be the largest
language group in the world, but it is easily the most useful. And Poland, Chłopicki
(2003) notes, has little history with the language. But German, as the second most
prevalent language studied, also functions as an economically wise choice for students.
Müller (1999), in the post-Soviet, pre-Euro era, makes an argument for the “utility” of the
German language and the apparent benefit to American society that results from high
classroom enrollments of students learning German as a foreign language (GFL). Utility,
which he defines as the language value of an “economically dominant culture,” will draw
smaller nations who will have a reason to speak the language of the larger country, as it
provides them a new market (p. 11). German, he argues, should be learned by American
students simply because the nation of Germany functions as an essential trading partner
for the United States. Though he never offers personal reasons (other than tourism, a very
surface reason) for students to take study GFL, he lists the benefits to American society
that result from offering more classes in the language, social and economic reasons that
are based on trade imports and exports, deutsche marks and dollars, overseas investments
and foreign travel. Despite the rise of popularity among such languages as Chinese,
Arabic, and Portuguese, “the current distribution of language [in the American education
system] among languages,” he concludes, “do not impart the skills American students
need to improve our economic competitiveness, meet our diplomatic commitments, and
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contribute to our alliances” (p. 19). Though he writes an obvious argument in favor of
GFL, he offers reasons for language learning that are echoed across the globe: this study
promotes “international literacy, global awareness, and strategic vision” in business
success.
But his case for GFL extends past the scope of the United States: Müller argues
for the case of GFL in Eastern Europe, suggesting that learning the language in countries
such as Poland and Hungary, would have access to “the opportunity it offers” (p. 17),
especially in the case of Poland given its shared history and geographic proximity to
Germany. His reason for language selection, in this case for choosing German, is purely
economic.
Even in stating the benefits of choosing German, he seems to understand why
many in the United States don’t: history. Statistics show a gash in GFL enrollments
following the United States’ entry into the First World War, and little recovery for the
status of the language until after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1960 (p. 18). This antiGerman sentiment, residual from the wars, could be an obvious deterrent for Poles, at
least in those whose nationalistic identity would prevent them from overlooking the past.
To answer these queries, we must turn to Poles themselves.
Research Needed
Dippelhofer-Stiem et al (1984), in a two year study of students from Austria, the
Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Yugoslavia sought to
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understand motivation in secondary school and expectations for continuing education and
career options, first using a survey then following with interviews that solicited
information through open-ended questions. The method of data collection used, though
arduous and time-consuming, was selected based on a belief that use of a “standardized,
closed questionnaire” might not offer categories that would “adequately reflect the
experiences and attitudes” of the students in question (p. 311). Further, the researchers
noted the intrinsic superficiality of such a method, as students could fall into a pattern of
offering preferred answers. For my own study, I echo similar concerns.
Just as Polish nationalism is best seen in the work of her writers, we cannot turn
to a survey to understand the research questions presented. Though a questionnaire with a
Likkert scale asking participants to quantify their feelings of nationalism or their like or
dislike of Russians and Germans might be an easy road, with percentages that are easy to
manipulate into a conclusion that reiterates the researcher’s hypothesis and literature
review, it takes an extremely complex issue and neatly minimizes it to a few short
answers. With a history as long and complex as the Polish have known, I find it hard to
believe that language choice is so easily based on a few sentences. And though they
might answer that way at first, I believe that the information garnered through extensive
case studies will not only answer the questions presented but help to understand how the
Polish consciousness, as exhibited in the individual, is coping with the changes currently
shaping the nation. Thus, in this study, I seek to look at personal histories, goals,
motivations, and attitudes of a few select people who may or may not mirror the society
that they function in.
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Though narrowly limited to Poland in this study, the ramifications of it reach
beyond the borders of Poland. By understanding the individual and their reasons for
language choice, as language educators and administrators we are better able to serve the
needs of our students. Further research in the United States regarding language choice
would be fodder for another thesis, judging by the size of the population. Even as distinct
members of society, people are, to the core, individuals, with individual motivations,
attitudes, ideals, hopes, goals, and fears. By exploring our students’ personal histories and
the histories of their social communities, we can begin to understand the massive role that
language plays in their lives.
Methodology
This study was born out of grand aspirations, the desire to come to an
understanding, however slight, of a student group, or even society, through the words of a
few. So much of educational research, in trying to mimic its distant medical relative,
attempts to distill the puzzle of human motivation to a more manageable form, usually
resulting in a questionaire where students are asked to equate their reactions to numbers
on a scale. When dealing with the most human of elements—the psyche, the affective—
how does a student look within themselves and decide that to the question “I would rather
spend time in English class than other classes” they “moderately agree” or “slightly
agree”? Without intense emotions, the answer becomes a coin toss. As will become
evident with the students involved in this study, motivation is an individual response, an
individual calculation, and ought to be treated as such.
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Thus, this study relies on personal interviews with participants in order to try and
come to a more complete picture of the chosen Polish students’ motivation. Dörnyei
(2001) notes that this form of investigation is “more appropriate to uncover the complex
interaction of social, cultural, and psychological factors within the individual learner” (p.
240). Ushioda (1994) too called for an increase in qualitative motivational research,
suggesting that “the dynamic interplay between learning experience and individual
motivation” is best understood through qualitative studies (p. 83). Through a battery of
questions intended to spur dialogue, I was able to obtain extensive information about the
students’ backgrounds, family histories, educational progress and goals, along with their
opinions about Polish, English, German, and Russian languages, nationalism, Russian
and German cultures, and current events. Dörnyei (2001) labels this format as an
“unstructured interview,” allowing flexibility to be built in so to allow the interviewee,
not necessarily the research questions, to guide the course of the interview (p. 238). With
this relaxed atmosphere, “the respondent may reveal more than he or she would in more
formal contexts,” and for this reason, the research questions are broad and seek to come
to an exact understanding of a specific place and group.
Between October and December of 2009, all subjects were interviewed at the
Department of Modern Languages at the Polish state university in Kielce, Jan
Kochanowski University. All interviews were recorded using GarageBand on a MacBook
and were later reviewed and transcribed in sections. All interviews lasted approximatly
one hour and were conducted in English, given the advanced nature of the students’
language abilities.
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In the interest of full disclosure, it is important to note that all four students are
students of mine from my American Literature and Speaking and Listening courses at Jan
Kochanowski University. The students themselves are all high-achieving, effusive
students and have pursued friendship with me outside of the classroom. For these
reasons, and their willingness to speak with me on a more personal level, they were asked
to participate. All four students signed basic release agreements and were assured that
their participation would have no implications with their grades in my classes. The
students were not financially compensated.
Obviously, all methods of research present drawbacks. In sacrificing the ease of
empirical data for rambling quotations, I am also aware that a one-on-one interview can
taint the information presented. This concern, and others, will be discussed later when I
consider the limitations of the study.
Research Questions
1. What role, if any, do Polish students have in language selection?
2. In regards to this choice or lack of choice, how do Polish students respond? Do
they exhibit a positive attitude toward second and third languages?
3. What role, if any, do history, nationalism, and love of the Polish language play
in this language selection and endurance?
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Chapter 8
PRESENTATION OF THE DATA
Context of the Study: The Place
Kielce, at first sight from the grime-laden windows of a Polish regional train, is a
city that appears nondescript. The train station hunkers above, a soulless shell of a
building through which businessmen and students pass. On its roof large letters announce
your arrival to the city, a gloomy version of the Hollywood hills against a cloudy
backdrop. Within the drafty building, sepia photographs harken back to the days of horsedrawn carriages and Russian soldiers in full dress uniform and pointed beards, the days of
Kielce’s adolescence. Once a city where the bishops of Kraków spent the summer, Kielce
is now an urban sprawl housing 200,000, centrally located between Kraków and Warsaw.
The tunnel leading to town cuts under the station and spits you out at the foot of
ulica Sienkiewicz, the bricked pedestrian walkway that runs uphill toward the Bishops’
Palace and the scattered buildings of Jan Kochanowski University. Under the curliques of
antique light poles people bustle, coming or going past the bright signs of the storefronts,
the banks attempting to cheer a gloomy economy with smiling faces and fields of daisies
that promise high interest rates and financial security. This street runs up the length of the
downtown area as the spine of the city, from which the roads like veins branch off to the
newer, more residential pockets. South and a slight west from centrum will take you to
the expansive medical school campus. To the north are the concrete cereal boxes of the
polytechnic institute; to the east are the forested parks and green-carpeted sanctuaries at
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the foot of the Holy Cross Mountains. It is not a loud city. Even at night, when the pubs
scattered on the curve of ulica Bodzentyńska gather revelers into their dark basements,
only the dull resonance of club beats can be heard on the cobbled street. But underneath
the surface, beneath the everyday stream of commerce and community, runs like a
current the unhappy history of the place.
Surrounded by green forests, Kielce is transected by a stream where, legend has it,
Polish prince Mieszko son of Bołesław the Bold, was lead by a vision to stop and rest.
According to Dr. Włodzimierz Batóg (personal communication, January 19, 2010), a
historian at the university, he awoke next to the large, white tusks of a mysterious animal.
A settelement was built there, named with the Polish word for tusks- kieł. Until 1795, it
was a private city, like the eastern cities of Zamość and Białystock, controlled by private
families and not open to a public city charter. During the partitions, the city fell under
Russian control, and the Germans during World War Two. Until then, Kielce remained
small, somewhat unimportant in the greater nation, known for limestone mining (Davies,
2004b). In 1946, however, one event catapulted the city into infamity and cemented its
place in Holocaust history.
Prior the to war, Kielce had been the home of a great number of Jews, crammed
into a ghetto once the Germans rolled through with their tanks. In the space of a week in
August 1942, the soldiers liquidaded the ghetto and massacred 20,000, today
commemorated by a large sculpture of a menorah sinking into the ground near the
ghetto’s one-time location (W. Batóg, personal communication, January 19, 2010).
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At the end of the war, a number of migrant Soviet Jews, freed from the camps,
resided in houses around the city. Blood libel, the old rumor once propogated by the
Catholic church that Jews kidnapped and murdered Gentile children to make matzo balls,
once again swirled around the city at the seeming disapperance of a Polish child, found
later to be taken by the police. With the Jews already thought by some to be the cause of
the destruction of Poland and now taking the few available jobs from Poles (a common
complaint against foriegn immigratnts), violence broke out and blood, according to one
survivor chronicled in Marcel Lozinski’s (Ostriker, de Verbizer, & Zauberman, and
Lozinski, 1988) short film on the subject, ran in the streets. At least forty-five Jews were
lynched, hung in the main square of the city for all to see (Davies, 2004b). Few were
punished for the event, and similar pogroms took place in the smaller cities around the
town, though there was litte foreign reportage on the subject. Today, an elementary
search for “Kielce” will result in hundreds of articles, almost as many concerning the
pogrom as the city itself.
But Kielce has moved on, past its horrific past, and has been rebuilt and
revitalized to serve as the capital of the region and the educational and cultural center for
this slice of Poland. During the nineties, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, Kielce managed
a face-lift that removed the fifty years of filth from the facades of the shops on
Sienkiewicz, the crown moldings and paned windows restored, geraniums set to bloom
on wrought iron balconies. Today it is a lovely city, perhaps not the most important but a
place where people live, work, and study. Kielce is home several institutions of higher
education, including Jan Kochanowski University (formally titled Uniwersytet
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Humanistyczno-Przyrodniczy Jana Kochanowskiego w Kielcach), a polytechnic
university, and several medical schools. Jan Kochanowski, like all Polish state
universities, modernized to the Bologna university system with entrance to the European
Union, following a three-year curriculum for the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree and
another two years for the magister, a Master’s equivalent (Filipkowski, 2003).
The four students interviewed here, listed below in Table 1, have strong
connections to the city, either as home or as adopted university home. As the generation
born at the end of the Soviet era, they are in a unique position to remember, however
darkly, the first days of democracy and still hear the stories of their grandparents. As the
next generation of Poland, their ppreerspective of their country and culture demonstrate a
distinctive blend of modern EU appreciaton and still an understanding of the depth of
their nation’s protectionist spirit.
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Table 1: Students’ Basic Information
Student/Age
Languages
Kasia, 22
Ryszard, 24
Maciej, 21
Danuta, 20
English
Years
studied
*10+
Self-assessment of
proficency
Advanced
Russian
8
Advanced
English
12+
Advanced
German
5
Intermediate
Russian
3
Mid-Beginner
English
13+
Advanced
German
5
High Beginner
English
12+
Advanced
German
9
Intermediate
* + indicates that student began study at a very early age in primary school.
Kasia: Background
Kasia is lanky and slender like many Western-Slavic women as is obvious in their
Polish uniform of skinny jeans tucked into knee-high boots, but she is taller than most.
The days that we met she always wore flat boots, perhaps not to tower like a skyscraper
above the rest, and her hair pulled back tight on the back of her head. She wears glasses,
the ubiquitous Polish frames with thick, dark stems and lenses that float over her eyes,
attached only to a slender bar of metal across the brow. At 22, Kasia is a true Kielce girl,
raised in this city where her relatives have resided for several generations. Her life has
always been within the borders of the country, like many Poles lacking the resources or
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reason to venture to another nation. School, family, boyfriend—all are contained in this
region, presenting no need to venture outside of the fold. Neither her father, employed by
the Kielce cultural center, nor her mother, a homemaker with one teenage son still in the
house, attended college, making Kasia the second in her family (after her elder brother, a
graduate of the polytechnic and a secondary school teacher) to pursue a degree in higher
education. Neither parent speaks any language but Polish, aside from some superficial
instruction in Russian during their school years, now mostly forgotten. Her grandparents,
survivors of World War Two, remember those days and related them to her only
occasionally, in stories that are “not very happy” (Kasia, personal communication,
October 28, 2009). Her grandfather had some role in the fight as a soldier, and lost a part
of his finger. About her relatives, she has little to say.
Like all the students participating in this study, I met Kasia through my work at
the university’s Department of Modern Languages, where she is enrolled as a part-time
student in English, attending weekend classes in order to complete her degree in the
language. During the week, she attends classes at another branch of the university,
majoring in Russian Philology, where she is doing masters-level coursework.
Like many Polish people, she juggles three lives in order to stay afloat: full-time
Russian study, part-time English student, and part time Russian teacher at a secondary
school, perhaps not the simplest teaching job, given universally acknowledged feelings
toward the Russian language in Poland. But despite the hardships of teaching the
language and the negativity toward it, she readily admits that she loves Russian. When
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asked to describe the language in a few words, she smiled shyly and said without
thinking, as if she had been asked before, “Beautiful soul. It is very sensitive for me.”
English began for her early on, in primary school with very basic language taught
by a Polish teacher. Her Russian studies began much later, in secondary school, and she
found it to be an extremely hard subject, with the pronunciation, stress, and grammatical
rules presenting the greatest challenges. But, as she progressed through three years in
secondary school, she came to enjoy and appreciate the language, getting over her initial
frustration as she found herself able to speak more and more. When her college entrance
exams ruled out the possibility of her pursuing English as a degree, she turned to Russian
and made that her course of full-time study. Taking the exams again, she picked up
English for part-time study a few years in.
Kasia has seen all kinds of reactions when people hear that she has dedicated so
much of her life to learning Russian. In her interview, she seemed to assume that
everyone would understand why Russian is looked down on, and simply commented that
Sometimes…they are shocked in positive or negative and sometimes it’s not very
nice for me to hear because they say ‘Why, it’s wasting time, it’s out of
fashion…why? Why because you aren’t able to do something else?”
Though her parents support her language learning, she knows that there is still some sort
of boundary: her parents were required to learn Russian in school and her grandparents
have vivid memories of the war and the communist years. Those two generations,
especially, are still plagued with stereotypes: “It’s easy to say I don’t like them because
they were fighting…many, many people, especially older people, have stereotypes but
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they can’t prove it.” She finds these stereotypes “mainly stupid” and refuses to take them
seriously.
Even eight years into Russian, she has had little opportunity to speak with native
Russians, aside from a few encounters with tourists in the city and one teacher at the
university who is Russian but “speaks Polish very well,” indicating that the class is
conducted bilingually for the ease of the students. She hasn’t visited Russia, though it is
obviously one of her great desires. Several years ago, she had the chance to go to
Moscow but it was preempted by the illness of a relative, perhaps a decision she regrets
given the marked disappointment on her face when she discusses this lost opportunity.
In the future, Kasia might leave Poland for work. This migration, for short-term
workers or permanent ex-patriots, gets a different reaction than a similar one might get in
the United States. “Many people would like to go abroad…they don’t want to live here.
It’s a good opportunity.” Further, those who do go abroad often look down on those who
choose to stay, Kasia reported. Patriotism is not dependent on being within the borders of
the country:
Patriotism is hard in these times, because money...it sometimes kind of shame
[sic] when you say ‘I love this city’ and ‘I love this country’ because people say
‘you must be psycho or something. Why don’t you go abroad and make money?’
She is often asked why she is still in Poland, when she is fluent in two other languages
and thus able to get a good job in a country like England or Ireland, where large groups
of Polish people live and work:
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I’ve fought with this kind of approach because I know languages and people are
shocked…that I say I would like to stay here and maybe, maybe someday I go
abroad but in this moment I would like to stay here.
Perhaps in this we see the pragmatism of the Poles: leaving your country does not equal
betrayal; “taking an opportunity” simply means that you are making life better for
yourself and your family. “I can still love my country and live somewhere else.”
Nationalism and patriotism must take a backseat to working and surviving. And between
the migrations and the poor economy, Kasia sees patriotism waning:
I think it’s changing and it’s not changing for the better but worse because I think
that people in Poland don’t trust the government, don’t trust politicians, and it’s a
very important factor…people no longer say ‘I’m patriotic’ and ‘I love my
country’…I think that people do, but I don’t remember when I’ve seen something
like this. Then [following communism] people had hope for a better life. They
observe that it’s not as happy and not as easy as they thought.
Though she considers herself to be patriotic, this patriotism is based only on love
of her own country and not on disliking another country, or harboring resentment toward
Germany or Russia. As a person who speaks Russian, she is used to negative reactions so
her coping mechanism may come as little surprise:
I’m not very keen on conflicts and politics and history and events that lead to
some kind of conflict…I’m trying not to hear, not to listen, not to see. That’s
maybe different, strange approach, but I really don’t use to be nervous about it.
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And I think it’s not my personally [sic], not my problem. Maybe it’s silly, but it's
that way.
Ryszard: Background
Round-faced, outspoken, and bespectacled in serious wire-rimmed glasses, the
sort that have a definite purpose and make an anti-fashion statement, Ryszard is the
opposite of Kasia in many ways. He is quick to answer questions, speaking for long
periods, and offering an unadulterated opinion without hesitancy. At 24, he is an older
student and has already tried his hand at a degree in the sceinces before deciding to shift
to modern languages, perhaps giving him a certain maturity and self-confidence in being
able to fluently express himself.
Ryszard’s father attended the polytechnic and received a bachelor’s degree in
mechanics, and he describes his mother as an “intellectual worker,” currently an
accountant (personal communication, December 3, 2009). Another child of Kielce, his
extended family including his grandparents, with whom he is very close, lives in the city.
He tells of his grandfather, a pianist who first exposed him to the classical compositions
of Shostakovich, Beethoven, and Schubert, who had bad health during the time of the war
and thus did not take part in the fighting. His grandfather learned some German during
the war as a “practical thing,” to be able to communicate with the soldiers. His father has
a similar grasp on the German language—work has sent him to do contracts in Germany,
and this has caused him to develop basic communicational skills, acquired through
speaking with others at his job sites. Ryszard’s mother is currently “learning about”
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Russian and English, though Ryszard states that she “does not have the knack for it,” an
indescribable something that he clearly believes he possesses.
From a young age, Ryszard was a precocious child, always questioning the world
around him. His first forays into learning English came as a result of watching English
cartoons, newly imported with the fall of communism, and wanting to know what the
characters were saying. He asked his parents for help with looking up words in the
dictionary, before progressing to a level where he could do this by himself. “The most
important thing was curiosity. I saw something foreign and I wondered, what is it? What
does it mean?” He began by learning single words, the words he heard repeated over and
over again, and then started to string those words into phrases. A short language course in
kindergarten, focused on the five year-old basics of colors, shapes, and greetings,
cemented his interest in the language. In the second grade, he began a formal course of
study that continued, with some breaks, until college. Apart from state school, he was
also enrolled by his parents in private English courses at one of the many language
schools around Kielce, since his parents recognized that he had “great skill in learning
langauges,” later financed by his grandmother who too recognized his abilities.
Like most Polish students, Ryszard began his third langauge in junior high, in
Poland called gimnazjum, this time turning toward the eastern neighbor: Russian, which
lasted for the three years of gimnazjum and ended when he began high school. He, like
Kasia, remembers the things people would say when they found out about his Russian
study: “There were some questions—why learn Russian now? We were fighting in the
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war against Russia so that we wouldn’t be forced to learn Russian.” He reported hearing
the attitude especially from the older generation, those who remembered oppression.
In secondary school he began another language, this time German, and spent three
years studying this language until beginning college. He again picked up German two
years ago, as it was a departmental requirement, and now speaks it at an intermediate
level. Like Kasia, he is able to see the positives of the language: “I think it’s quite
beautiful really…my grandfather was a musician and while being at his house I was often
exposed, you could say, to some German or Russian language in the form of music.”
Ryszard connects the language to the culture, mentioning a few composers whose work
was purely instrumental, thus not exposing him at all to the words of the language but the
greatness that a culture had produced. By listening to Beethoven, he implies, he was able
to understand something about the music and melody of the German language,
demonstrating openness to the culture as a whole.
Unlike Kasia, Ryszard has had extended contact with German people, and has
lived for two short periods outside of Poland. During his first time away, he lived in
Denmark and worked for the Dutch electronics company Philips, where he filled orders
and shipped merchandise from a processing plant. There, he had access to people from all
over Europe and even a number of Asians, come to Denmark for its impressive kroner
and agreeable work environment. During a second tenure abroad, he worked at
construction sites in Germany, again surrounded by with multinationals, most from
Pakistan and Turkey, with Germans functioning as the supervision staff. This gave him
an opportunity to use his German, as it was the common language between all the
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laborers. Nowadays, as a full-time student in his second year of study, German only finds
use in the classroom, and he rarely uses it outside the university building on Kościuszko
Street.
Patriotism, he stated, “it’s quite important to us,” speaking of his family. He does
not see a link between his own personal love for his country and learning languages—his
love of Poland is in no way deterred by his love of German and Russian:
There are people who simply believe that if you are patriotic you should not
simply study and language except your own. But I don’t think this way. On the
other hand you have people who simply believe it’s not important where you live
but that you simply get along with yourself, yes? Well, actually, I don’t quite
agree with this. You could say I am quite in the middle of these two extremes. If I
would, for example, have any opportunity to work abroad, to find a better life
abroad, I’d probably go out there and live there. But still I would not, say, deny
the fact that I am Polish.
Like Kasia, he does not believe that patriotism is dependent on location, though he
expresses affection for his country and respect for all that has occured to bring Poland to
where it is today, while still balancing them with an open-minded view of the world:
“You should remember those things but...you should not simply base your predjudices on
that—you should let bygones be bygones, if you will...you should not let it spoil your
percpetions of other countries.”
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Maciej: Background
With an easy smile and infectous laugh, Maciej begins the interview by diving
into the first question and answering with a sort of cynical honesty: “I am very proud of
Polish history and accomplishments although we haven’t won any wars since 1410”
(personal communication, December 9, 2009). Dark-eyed, blonde, and self-conscious of
his English, though he has little reason to be so, he could easily pass for an American in
jeans and an English-slogan shirt. Just 21, he has travelled to the United States and
manned an espresso machine at a London coffee shop, using both oppurtunities to hone
and improve his already impressive grasp on the English language. Maciej is a third year
English philology student, one semester from graduation and planning to continue on to a
Master’s degree, most likely studying American Literature at Jagiellonian University in
Kraków. Though he plans to continue his studies in English, his ultimate career goal is to
work in public relations, planning parties and events. Unlike the other students, he does
not come from the Kielce area- because of his acceptance to the university, he moved
here from his hometown in the south of Poland, near the Slovak border. In his family, his
father attended vocational school and got a job as a manager at a concrete plant and his
mother, a college graduate, is a preschool teacher. Neither speaks English but both
understand Russian—like so many from their generation—and are able to speak a little.
He began English in primary school and continued for thirteen years, with a oneyear break. Because of an uncle in the United States and an American-born teacher in the
first grade, he had always been fascinated by English, especially the American variety. In
the early years, it was a choice for him to study, an extra class, and became compulsory
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in the fifth grade, though he enjoyed learning as it opened up a new channel of
communication, especially with the American branch of his family.
In secondary school, he began a third language, this time one that he did not take
to so naturally: German. When asked about what languages other than English that he
speaks, he grimaced and answered, “I have been struggling with German for five years
now,” not even able to say that he “speaks” German. “It’s a very basic, elementary level.
If I learn before the test…I can just learn by heart some stuff. I cannot communicate.”
Though he liked German in secondary school, his attitude has experienced a dramatic
shift since then, a phenomenon that will be discussed in depth later. But his dislike of
German is a result of the very sound of the language: “It pains me to hear. It’s very harsh.
It’s like, I don’t know, it was a needle in my ear. They convey no emotion in their
language. It’s very, very stable language, no ups and downs, just one level.” He finds the
accents, whether from Berlin or Munich, to be unintelligible and even more confusing,
along with the grammar: “they have complex compounds…I don't like it! And these
things at the beginning of the word…” He carefully stated, several times in fact and
without any prompting, that he is able to divorce his feelings toward the German
language from his understanding of history: one does not influence the other, and he
doesn’t hate the language because of the people.
I personally don’t hold any resentment to anyone in the world but you know a lot
of Polish people do and it’s not only towards Germans or Russian but Jews and
there are infamous Polish jokes about Jews that are very sad for me.
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Maciej’s appreciation of his country mostly likely came from his grandmother,
who told him stories of occupied, war-torn Poland. Her home was seized by German
soldiers and her family was forced to live side-by-side with the enemy, giving her the
opportunity to learn a few phrases in German. After the war, she remembers the poverty
that accompanied the slow rebuilding of the nation, and with these stories she has
established a respect for the nation within him. That, and history classes—“People do not
appreciate it these days but it is still inside of me.” As for Independence Day in
November, he is not completely sold on the pageantry and democratic celebrations of the
post-communist state: “I’m not really for it…I can pray for my homeland but I’m like
75% patriotic,” put off like many by the governmental problems and the continuing
hardships. He believes his opinion is different than that of young people, those his age
and teenagers. Teenagers, who don’t care about anything really, he said with a laugh,
“just forget about it. We just move on; it’s like, you know, going forward, forgetting
about the remote past.”
Danuta: Background
A self-proclaimed hippie, Danuta seriously looks—and acts—the part. Her hair is
long and straight, a shock of bottle-red, the flaming vermillion that seems to be one of
Poland’s most popular hair dye colors. Unlike nearly every other Polish woman, she
eschews the denim Saran wrap of skinny jeans for bohemian bellbottoms, and a peace
sign on a leather thong around her neck preempts any questions. She’s been to Polish
Woodstock, the European version of the festival held close to the border with Germany
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and at home on a shelf sits a coffee can, collecting ticket money for next year. She
dreams of road tripping around her nation in a VW van resplendent with psychedelic
flowers painted on the doors. And she loves German.
At 20, she is the first in her immediate family to go to college. Her father works
as an electrician and her mother is employed by a shoe factory in a town of about 50,000
north of Kielce. When she began learning languages, she noted little reaction from her
parents, and stated that “they weren’t supportive but they didn't pay attention because
they saw that I was interested in it and I was a kind of child that I was just learning by
myself” (personal communication, December 17, 2009). She started to learn English by
herself as a child, fascinated by the languages that she heard on television and in music
on the radio. “I realize I like foreign languages and I want to understand what people
say…I was very interested in different cultures.” In the sixth grade, her parents enrolled
her in a private language school, since second language instruction was not provided in
her public school curriculum. In gimnazjum, English classes were mandatory but not
graded, so “everyone treated the course like, ‘oh, I have to, so I am here.’”
She began German in secondary school—a language, that, like her classmates, she
was not excited to learn in the beginning.
Firstly I didn't like it…I had this similar attitude, this connected with World War
Two, but later I started to love it, actually, because I was fascinated with ski
jumping and I wanted to know the language that my favorite ski jumpers spoke.
It’s the same with English, but earlier.
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But the more she learned of the language, the more she liked it. Unlike Maciej, who
compared the language to being stabbed in the ear, Danuta sees German as pleasant:
I like the sound of German, and I think it’s a really nice because I’ve heard
Germans doing their speech and it wasn’t that harsh as people think so, I don't
know, I just like it because I think it’s a very nice language…But not many people
are of this opinion.
Despite her love of the language, she feels that she has not progressed far in it,
especially when compared with her English. While she regularly watches television and
movies in English, and listens to British and American music, she does not view very
much media in German. Listening to native speakers in German is the hardest for her,
and so she does not watch German newscasts and has had almost no contact with nativespeaking Germans, never having one as a teacher. When a family of Germans visited her
town, she was too afraid to speak to them—either because of the German or because they
were all teenage boys.
Like the others, she displays a respect for Poland’s past and considers herself to
be “patriotic, but not in that fanatical way that people think is the only one to be chosen,”
referencing the long-held belief, purported by Mickiewicz and the like, that Poland is the
“chosen one” of Europe, the holder of the highest ideals and liberties. Her affection for
her nation is tempered with an understanding of the current situation, and practical
standpoint:
I love my country as itself and I'm grateful to all of those people who died for
Poland to be free. But I hate the situation in Poland—politics, government, and all
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those things, which happened in the past... I mean that we have always been so
weak and dependent from other countries...
She sees patriotism, a different brand from her own, all around as a sort of
ignorant belief system bordering on outright ethnocentrism, dependent on putting down
others in order to raise themselves up: “They don’t have idea what it means to be
patriotic. They dislike foreigners, or those Polish people who work abroad. They take it
as betrayal.” To many, patriotism equals being “fanatically addicted” to Poland and thus
“not being open for different countries and things.” Patriotism is, of course, linked to the
past, despite the fractured view of history that she believes so many have, and still
impacts foreign relations, from the government down to even a person-to-person level:
“most of people forgave Germans but they still have some feelings that don't allow them
to treat Germans the same way they treat other people from other countries.”
This is not a view that she shares. As an “open” person, living in Poland is not the
decider of her patriotism. Like Maciej, she imagines her life somewhere else—most
likely the United States—and hopes to one day live there, a move that she claims will not
displace any of her patriotic spirit:
Such thinking that you are "loyal" to your country only when you live in it, makes
me nervous. It doesn't matter where you live... As I said before, I love my country
and I'm proud of being Polish, but my dream is to live abroad. I love changes and
different cultures. And I think I can be patriotic even if I live at the end of the
world.
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Chapter 9
FINDINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS
The Importance of Polish
Despite their backgrounds, all four students agreed on one thing: Polish, and the
use of grammatically correct Polish, is very important. “I always try to speak good Polish
and not stupid mistakes,” Kasia stated, and Danuta voiced similar concerns:
I like when language is correct. Sometimes when people—Polish people—make
mistakes, which are obvious, I always correct them because I can’t stand the
mistakes they do—I am very sensitive in this way. I like literature, poetry…I
write myself.
Unknowingly, they agreed with Edwards’ (1985) concept of a symbolic language, stating
that Polish itself held importance to them not only as a daily language or mother tongue,
but as a symbol of history and culture. Polish language will always be important, Ryszard
said, because
it is like history. Let’s not forget that in Polish history there was this period where
there was no country of Poland, so the langauge was important for those
people...simply it was important to maintain the cultural identity of the people and
the national identity as well.
Somehow, “good” Polish gives respect to the past, almost acknowledging what has
happened before to bring Poland to this point, and speaking it correctly, despite the
inherent difficulty, is important to anyone cognizant of that fact. But it is a hard language:
“That’s common thinking, that Polish is complicated, because it has time sounds,
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different forms of words, nouns,” Kasia stated and Maciej agreed: “It’s beautiful and
tough, even for native speakers but certainly worth studying.”
While working in London, Maciej noticed a trend among the Polish ex-patriots
that he found disturbing: their apparent inability to speak either Polish or English with
skill. The Poles with whom he worked would often substitute Polish words with English
words when speaking in their native tongue, resulting in a sort of “Polglish…it’s not
Polish anymore,” at least Polish that a non-English-speaking Pole would recognize.
Without further understanding of the individuals of which he spoke, it is impossible to
deduce whether his coworkers were beginning a descent into semilingualism, defined by
Edwards (1994) as “lacking complete fluency in either language” (p. 58), or they were
simply, and less negatively, creating a hybridized version of speaking in which they
blended their native and second languages together. Whether the case, Maciej found
their seeming inability to speak either language properly disconcerting, given his own
high regard for Polish.
In relation to the European Union’s Language Policies, the students displayed
opposite opinions. When asked what he thinks about the EU “languages of business,”
Ryszard voiced his discontent:
When you think about the European Union, what I don’t like about it is you have
these three or four languages which simply dominate everything. It is idiocy. I
think that every language is important there. Of course there should be something
like one language is used to communicate with each other but then again you
should not forget about those things. I mean, we are different countries.
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Here, Ryszard demonstrates an attitude that seems to be shared by many Poles: that being
lumped into the European Union will cause them to lose some of their distinctivness,
some of their pride in the nationality and accomplishments. And, in the worst case,
entrance and continued participation could lead to the demise or at least the devaluing of
their language. Maciej did not agree, taking a more practical view on the subject:
entrance to the EU represents a postive shift, and even though Polish is not the central
langauge of business, the Union still protects all languages. “I can be in Italy and get a
document in Polish. It’s the law.” Despite immigration, and the EU, he sees the general
state of Polish language as healthy:
We have no immigrants in Poland, actually. It’s us who immigrate. It’s different.
So Polish language is I think in good state, in good health. But people don’t read,
if they don’t watch news on TV, or listen to news on the radio …but the general
health of Polish is good, I think.
Ever the pragmatists, they also realize that Polish, despite being their native
tongue, won’t get them as far as another more dominant langauge, such as English. Loan
words, so long as they don’t sound “silly or different,” in the words of Kasia, are not such
a “disturbing” phenomenon. Despite the prevalence of languages like English, and the
“normal” custom of borrowing words into their language, she and the others did not see
Polish language disappearing. To understand Polish culture you must speak the language,
and the later will always be connected to the former.
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Language Choice: “Obliged to Learn”
Obviously, the subject of this study is language choice, which in the United States
manifests itself in that students have an actual choice: at university level, there exist a
dozen languages that students may take in order to satisfy foreign language requriements.
Depending on location, high schools often offer a similar battery from Spanish to
Japanese to Latin. But in Poland, at least for the four students interviewed, language
choice does not exist. In primary school, secondary school, and even the current program
at unviersity does not give students the option to select the language that they will study.
All of the students began their English studies at the primary level, usually around
the fourth or fifth grade. A third language began at gimnazjum or secondary school,
depending on the student, and again there was no choice. Or, as Kasia so poetically put it,
“We were obliged to study.” For her, the language was Russian because that was the
teacher available to her class. Another class learned French, but there was no possibility
to move to the other class based on preference. Ryszard faced a similar non-choice in
gimnazjum, which he chuckled was “forced upon us to some extent,” though he went on
to declare that this imposition was not such a bad thing, since language learning “is quite
good. The more you learn the better.” The language available, it seems, is a case of “blind
luck,” or, more likely, a decision made by the school administrator,
it might be the principal’s ideas. If he wants to give students the option to learn
Russian, then he will try find someone who will teach them. If he wants
somebody to learn German, he will find someone to teach them.
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As for university, students take a succession of exams that place them both at
universities around the country and decide their course of study. Here, the students do
have a choice: top marks on the English exams will give them a place in the program, if
they choose that path. For a degree in English phililogy through the Department of
Modern Languages at Jan Kochanowski University, three years of coursework in
practical classes such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing are required along with
classes in English and American Literature, culture, linguistics, grammar, and history. A
second language is also required, one class for two years. But again, even at the
university level in the ambitiously-titled Department of Modern Languages, there is no
choice. “When I came to here I was told I would have a choice of languages,” Maciej
explained, “But I didn’t. It was German…Everyone has to study German. And we don’t
really like it here.” He had hoped to start another language, something from the Romance
family such as Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese, but there was only German. Danuta,
herself taken with German and happy to study it, understands the situation because of her
peers’ response: a friend who spent six years learning Russian in gimnazjum and
secondary school was not allowed to continue with the language because it was not
offered by the department, even though the university has an entire Russian Philiology
department in a building across town. Apparently, there is no mixing between
departments and her friend had to switch to German. This requirement has bred vocal
dissent among the students: “They hate it.” Other departments give their students more
options when it comes to foreign languages—but not, it would seem, the Department of
Modern Languages.
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According to Danuta, it is not only the requirement that breeds anti-Germanlanguage sentiment but the teachers themselves:
Their teacher wants them to understand everything so she speaks German; she
thinks that they know all the words and understand everything so they hate
German because they connect it with bad feelings…it’s very important, the style
of teaching.
Her opinion—or that of her peers, voiced second-hand—seems to be shared. This
common vein exists among most of the students when asked about their teachers:
couched with the proper respect, they admit that their language teachers, especially in
secondary school, left much to be desired. Without giving much comment, Kasia admited
that her secondary school instructors were not so good at teaching, themselves Poles
teaching Russian as a second language. Danuta seemed much more willing to engage
personally on the topic, demonstrating that the problem with German instruction in Polish
schools runs much deeper than simply teachers: “English is always more developed, and
there are more books and teachers make this langauge more important than German. You
do a lot of things in class and the things are more difficult.”
English appears to enjoy a level of prestige, given that it is by far the most widely
taught language. Teaching programs abound, both with university level masters-programs
and at language schools in the form of short-course teaching certificates, in which
prospective teachers learn methodology and are given practice, under supervision, in real
classrooms before embarking on their own teaching journeys. For other languages, this
pedagogical and hands-on training is not always available. Kasia, for example, began
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teaching at secondary school level after completing a course in Russian Philology,
focused centrally on the different aspects of the language and not teaching methodology.
She admits that being a Russian teacher—for a multitude of reasons—is difficult:
“Russian is less popular than English and it’s sometimes harder to teach Russian.”
Analysis of Motivational Factors
For analysis of the students‘ motivation in learning a second or third language,
numerous linguistic frameworks, as discussed earlier, exist. In order to succinctly
synthesize these factors, including Deci’s (1972) intrinsic and extrinsic, Gardner’s (1985)
intensity of motivation, desire to learn langauges, and attitudes toward learning situation,
and Gardner and Tremblay’s (1993) later inclusion of motivational antecedents, Dornyei
(2001) created a framework with seven dimensions to include nearly all these
considerations. I will thus use this framework to analyze the information previously
presented.
Affective/integrative dimension
The first dimension, seen in nearly every previous motivational framework, looks
at the very center of a person’s motivation, including such factors as “integrative
motivation, affective motive, language attitudes, intrinsic motivation, attitudes toward L2
learning, enjoyment and interest” among a number of others (p. 65). As this dimension,
titled the Affective/integrative dimension, covers massive territory, for each student and
their learned languages I have chosen to discuss the factors that relate most to this study,
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given that we are attempting to come to a complete picture of the students’ attitude
toward the given language and culture: integrative motivation (if they plan or will attempt
to integrate into the culture of one of their language groups, or even their willingness to
do so much), enjoyment and interest, and language attitude, as attitude toward L2
learning will be discussed in-depth later.
Kasia: Russian and English
Integrative motivation: Kasia demonstrates very little desire to actually integrate
into Russian or an English-speaking culture such as the United States or the United
Kingdom. Though she admittedly enjoys reading Russian writers and poets, and would
appreciate the chance to spend some time in Russia, she would like to permanently
remain in Poland as a teacher of Russian. English is of secondary concern—as with
Russian, she would not turn down the opportunity to work abroad for a given period, but
does not want to emigrate.
Enjoyment and interest: Kasia appears to enjoy learning Russian, and welcomes
the challenge, given that it is her primary focus of study. She also shows enjoyment and
interest in learning English, though appears to favor Russian over English in language
learning.
Language attitude: Overall, Kasia’s attitude toward Russian is very positive, and
she demonstrates an appreciation for even the aesthetics of the language, though admits
its difficulty. She does not possess the same affection for English and she didn’t have a
favorite writer in the language.
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Ryszard: English, German, and Russian
Integrative motivation: Ryszard expressed openness to leaving Poland, but did not
specify which place he wished to go, though he did mention Russia since he would like to
improve his abilities in Russian. In past contexts, i.e. his Danish and German experiences,
he did not integrate with the societies given that he was a short-term worker, and had
little contact with actual native-speaker members of those language groups. Further, in
Poland, he has no contact with speakers of languages other than Polish or English.
Enjoyment and interest: Ryszard seems to get great enjoyment out of all facets of
language learning, and his only obstacle appears to be the number of hours in a day or his
schedule that prevent him from learning languages. He admits that he studies language in
his free time, and considers it something of a hobby along with an academic pursuit.
Language attitude: Overall, his attitude toward all of the languages he has studied
is positive. He seemed to like the idea of learning more language on top of these, to
create a sort of battery of languages available at his disposal. While reading often in
English, he admits that his German and Russian are far behind in terms of competence
and he doesn’t spend much time with media from those languages, though he does like
German music- the classical, instrumental variety.
Maciej: English and German
Integrative motivation: Maciej would like to move permanently to the United
States and possibly become a naturalized citizen. There is no chance that he would pursue
a life in Germany. He has no contact with German speakers.
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Enjoyment and interest: Maciej demonstrated great enjoyment for learning
English and has interest not only in the language, but the various forms of media
expressed in English. Toward German, however, he stated over and over again his
extreme dislike for the language, comparing it to something painful and not at all
enjoyable.
Language attitude: Maciej has an extremely positive and open attitude toward
English. He appreciates correct English and, were he to have children in the United States
or another English-speaking nation, he would want them to speak English as a first
language. His attitude toward German is very negative, and he very much dislikes the
sound, syntax, and grammatical structure of the language.
Danuta: English and German
Integrative motivation: Though she likes German very much, Danuta wouldn’t
really consider moving to Germany. She would like, in the future, to immigrate to the
United States, especially California. She also has no contact with German speakers, and
has not had the opportunity to speak with a native German.
Enjoyment and interest: Danuta gets great enjoyment from learning both English
and German. She admits to being one of the few students in her year that enjoys German
class, and seems quite content to learn the language slowly, despite the negative attitudes
of her classmates.
Language attitude: Danuta admits that she loves both languages, and the reason
that she is more competent in English is not because of personal choice but because of
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what is available to her. She frequently listens to American and English media and music,
and reads quite a bit in English. She feels her competence in German prevents her from
enjoying German media, so she doesn't read or listen to much German outside of lessons
any more.
Instrumental/pragmatic dimension
The second dimension constructed by Dornyei is the Instrumental/pragmatic
dimension, the very practical factors that govern life. These are “largely extrinsic” factors
that quite obviously play the largest role in the lives of Polish students. Though they
might enjoy one course of study, another is chosen simply because there are more
economic opportunities associated with it.
Kasia: Russian and English
Utilitarian factors: Kasia is currently a Russian teacher and will continue with
this occupation. Having a certificate in English will offer her more work, since English is
in more demand in Polish schools than Russian. Both languages provide her ample work
opportunities, and were also her best subjects in school.
Ryszard: English, German, and Russian
Utilitarian factors: Ryszard is not sure what he will do upon completion of his
degree, but it will certainly include English. He may become a language teacher, using
either of his two best languages, English and German, or a translator, again making use of
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both languages. English and German have already been useful to him in work situations
and have allowed him to do short-term work in Denmark and Germany.
Maciej: English and German
Utilitarian factors: Given his plans to emigrate, English serves a very utilitarian
function for Maciej. He plans to have a career as a public relations specialist, either in the
United States or in a larger Polish city where English will be very useful in dealing with
the international domain. It has already served an economic role in his life as his English
allowed him to work for a summer in England, earning in pounds.
Danuta: English and German
Utilitarian factors: For Danuta, like the others, English serves an important
economic role as she would also like to emigrate or stay in Poland as an English teacher
or translator.
Macrocontext-related dimension
The third dimension, as it relates to the general social environment and the
interplay of foriegn langauges with native culture, is of great interest to this study. This
dimension is entitled the Macrocontext-related dimension and deals with the often broad,
difficult to define social factors that impact student motivation, including “multicultural,
intergroup and ethnolinguistic relations” (p. 65). Obviously, the lengthy dissection of
Polish history conducted earlier in the study suggests that this dimension, perhaps more
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than others, would play an important role in shaping student motivation, given the
difficult relations that have existed between Poles and their neighbors, now the central
languages that students learn. As demonstrated earlier in the review of past research,
Gardner and Lambert (1972) found that not only the attitudes of the individual directed at
a foreign group but the attitudes of the community itself—and the way that it views itself
vis-à-vis the foreign community—play an important role in deciding motivation.
Frequently, in the course of the interviews, the students would acknowledge the
opinions of their peers or of the greater population, fronting the opinion with “others
think…” or “there are some people who believe…” demonstrating that they themselves
hold wildly different beliefs or convictions.
Kasia: Russian and English
Kasia understands the social environment of Poland and its dislike of Russians. In
order to combat this, she avidly ignores and avoids politics, and doesn’t pay attention to
the responses of others. She considers herself patriotic but admits that it is sometimes
hard to be dedicated to a country with so many problems and few solutions—and few
jobs. Further, she acknowledges that leaving Poland, as so many have, is not necessarily
“betraying” the country but is seen as looking out for one’s own interests. As for English,
she does not see that it has any impact on her “Polishness” and, like most others, sees it
simply as a way to get ahead, excel, and demonstrate linguistic competence.
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Ryszard: English, German, and Russian
Ryszard is a person who is actively interested in politics and the news, and
follows world events. He understands the attitude of others around him, especially the
older generation, but believes that his own perspective is unique, given that his peers
seem to care very little about history or the reason that intergovernmental relations
operate as they do. He was not aware of the “historical factors” when first beginning
language study but even after he heard of them, it did not impact his language learning.
He equates learning German and Russian to learning English- thinking of it simply as “a
foreign language which people use.” The situation between Poland and Germany, for
example, wasn’t of importance to him, since he has actively adopted a “let bygones be
bygones” approach to world politics: “of course there is history but let’s not simply be
xenophobic about it.”
Maciej: English and German
Maciej too understands the attitude that others have, though he does not see that
same attitude pervasive in his family even though his grandmother had ample contact
with German Nazis during World War Two. He is very proud of the Polish past, even if
his peers have forgotten it, but isn’t so certain of the incarnation that the current Poland
has taken, and declares himself to be “75%” patriotic. Living abroad and being Polish are
not contradictory ideas—he can still be a Pole who loves his nation and lives in the U.S.
As for German, he declares that he has no ill feelings towards the Germans,
though he still does not like the language and feels that he cannot learn it.
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Danuta: English and German
Like the others, Danuta is aware of the general consensus towards Germans based
on the past and even present politics. She too distances herself from these opinions,
though it wasn’t her first reaction. When she first started to learn German, she didn’t like
it: “I had this similar attitude, this connected with World War Two,” which disappeared
when she was able to simply see it as a language and connected it to the heroes of her
favorite sport, ski jumping.
Educational context-related dimension
The next dimension that will be discussed here, the Educational context-related
dimension, was originally listed by Dornyei as sixth in his model, but has been moved up
to the fourth place given its importance, a conclusion that came out in the interviews
themselves. Nearly all of the students, prompted or on their own, mentioned the obvious
shortfalls of their education system. As listed below in the analysis, poor quality teachers,
materials, or lack of hours with a subject all contributed to the generally negative
assessment of their education context.
This dimension deals with an “appraisal of the immediate learning
environment…and school context” (p. 65). Often, when students such as the Americans
at my university, are given a choice of languages, the role of the classroom plays a less
important role. In Poland, I quickly discovered, or at least in the situation studied,
students do not have this “pure” choice of not only which language to study, but even
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which time, which days, or which teacher. Thus, the educational environment, as will be
discussed here, plays a role almost equal to the three factors listed before.
Kasia: Russian and English
Assessment of education environment: For English, Kasia sees the environment as
very positive. Students react well to the language and have a desire to learn it. In the
school where she teaches, Russian does not enjoy such a “prestigious” reputation and
often it is much harder to teach than English. She has had several native-speakers teach
her English, but only one Russian at the university level. Her earliest teachers of Russian
weren’t very good, and did a poor job explaining and reviewing grammatical rules and
offered little practice with pronunciation. It should also be noted that for Kasia, both
languages were choices: her original diploma is in Russian, so she actively chose to study
that language at the university. She started a second course in English, again her own
choice, and is currently in the middle of it.
Ryszard: English, German, and Russian
Assessment of education environment: Though Ryszard did not choose to study
German at the university level as his third language, he does not appear to object to
studying the language. Though Russian felt “forced upon us,” he sees it as a positive
thing since he appreciates all forms of language learning. He did not seem to harbor any
ill will towards the university based on its limited choice of languages but accepted the
lack of choice as standard.
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Maciej: English and German
Assessment of education environment: Of the four students, Maciej had the most
outward dislike toward one of his languages, German. He seemed to feel as though it had
been forced upon him and, worse, the university was not upfront with the language
options at the beginning of his study. He did not have much to say on the quality of the
educational experience, but he has been studying the language for five years and is still at
a beginner level, which he blames on studying for the test, which leaves him unable to
actually communicate, as he can in English.
Danuta: English and German
Assessment of education environment: Like Kasia, Danuta pointed out the
“prestige” status of English in that the materials are better and even the teachers seem to
be better prepared to teach English than the German teachers are to teach German. She
finds the textbooks to be very juvenile and notes that this is usually the problem—either
good materials in German as a Foreign Language do not exist or the university chooses to
make do with what they already have. Though she enjoys studying German, she realizes
that her classmates resent the lack of choice in the matter.
Dornyei presented three final dimensions that, though essential for a full picture
of motivation, do not play active roles in this study, thus will be introduced in less detail.
The fifth factor, the Self-concept related dimension, functions as an assessment of a
person’s “self-confidence, anxiety, and need for achievement” (p. 65). Both of the
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females, Kasia and Danuta, exuded the very Polish sense of self-modesty, not prepared to
“sing” their achievements in language though both have obviously progressed very far.
Danuta was somewhat ashamed of her inability to remember much of the German that
she had learned in the past and Kasia was unsure of her skill level in Russian. Ryszard,
on the other hand, lacked modesty when it came to describing his own language-learning
ability, informing me that everyone, from his parents to their friends to his teachers, has
told him that he had that special “knack” for learning languages. Maciej was much more
modest, even self-deprecating, when describing the anxiety and stress he gets from
learning, or attempting to learn, German. Perhaps in looking at an overall picture of
motivation for each student in this dimension, only Maciej would come forward as a
person whose ability to learn language—German, of course—is severely hampered by his
attitude of not being competent or not even being capable of competence.
The sixth dimension put forth by Dornyei is the goal-related dimension,
“involving goal characteristics” and closely related to the second dimension, in which I
related the students’ pragmatic reasons for learning language. Thus, we will glance for a
moment at the seventh dimension, the significant others-related dimension, which plays a
role for all the students. In direct contradiction to my wonderings, almost all the students’
parents enrolled them in extra-curricular language learning because they saw it as a
positive in their lives, though it should be noted that all the students studied English at an
early age, not German or Russian. Kasia’s parents are happy at their daughter’s success in
language learning and are content that she is satisfied with her progress. Ryszard, the
only child for his parents, is frequently cheered on with their elaborate praise. Maciej’s
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family, with relatives in the U.S., also see his language learning as important and are
happy that he is doing what he likes. Though Danuta’s parents do not seem as supportive
as the rest, she still says that they accepted her as a self-starting learner, eternally curious
about the world, and enrolled her in special classes because she asked. Overall, these
students come from very supportive language learning environments and even their elder
relatives, those who survived the war, view their language learning as only a positive
development.
Discussion of Results: "Historical Issues"
This study set out to explore the attitudes of students towards the second and third
languages that they study, those languages being English, German, and Russian as
represented by this student population. As earlier suggested in the preliminary research,
English is perceived very differently in the part of Europe than German or Russian and
the students did not necessarily connect it to one culture, such as American or British. It
appeared to function in something of a neutral status, not representing one particular
group, but functioning as the lingua franca among other European, non-Polish-speaking
nations. For Maciej, it was the language of communication among various cultures
(Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian) in his London work environment.
With these students, English occupies a place of prestige, perhaps rightfully so as
they are majoring in English Philology, with the exception of Kasia who has a double
major in Russian and English. The decision to study English in the first place was their
“purest” choice, the decision over which the students had the most control. After taking
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the matura, the senior-level exams in high school that rank subjects and inform the
students as to which subjects are “open” to them to study at university, all students made
the conscious decision to pursue English. As demonstrated in the interviews, the students
hold generally positive views towards the English language: all speak advanced levels of
the language, seem open to the cultural aspects, and enjoy English-speaking media,
literature, and music. Their reasons for studying English are a hybrid of interest and
economics—most openly admit to liking the language very much and acknowledge that
this language, as a so-called world language, will only be a positive force on their future.
With English occupying such an obvious status in the students’ estimation, we
will spend most of this discussion on the other two languages, which have the deepest
connections to Polish history and nationality. Given that all four students are in their
early twenties, they were born during a time of political upheaval in Poland, the mid and
late eighties when the effects of martial law and a crumbling Kremlin turned Poles
toward democracy, that Western beacon with its acceptance of religion, its golden
capitalism, its freedom. Entrance into NATO and later the European Union simply moved
Poland further away from the past, the forced Eastern knots of Russian domination and
away from communism. With the political shift comes an idealogical one, an
understanding about the individuality of man, the importance of personal freedoms, and
the acceptance of the West as a friend, not the mortal enemy.
All the students admitted this liberal, progressive attitude when it came to a
discussion of stereotypes about their often pugnacious neighbors, Germany and Russia.
They quickly awknowledged the attitudes that pervade their nation and culture, those that
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see the Russians as drunkards and the Germans as power-hungry, but distanced
themselves from these attitudes. Ryszard and Maciej saw it as an issue of the past,
something sour from their history that need not be dredged up again- just as they were not
the soldiers to fight in the wars, the current Germans have only blood to connect them
back the Nazis of the 1930s and 40s. “I always separate,” Maciej told me, “It’s like, it’s
not their fault. They were born after it happened.” His dislike of the German language—
based in part, it would seem, on his being forced to take the language—has no bearing on
his opinion of the greater German people: “I would not feel anything hostile toward
German people…It’s not because of their history because I would like to learn Russian- it
sounds good for me...I don’t have any, you know, historical issues about it.”
These “historical issues” may even be lost on their generation, Ryszard told me.
In high school, when he was learning Russian, students displayed the ambivalence typical
of teenagers. They didn’t hate Russian for being Russian- they hated it for being another
school subject that didn’t appear to have any bearing on their lives. To young people,
Russian is viewed “simply as a language, you know, not controversial…simply like
learning Chinese or Japanese or some language of the African tribes. There is no
relationship with history.” He noted that his generation doesn't care about history or the
accomplishments of the past and perhaps this is why they don’t mind learning Russian.
But he, as a person who is cognizant of history, has the same attitude: Russian is a
language. German is a language. German helps me communicate with my coworkers in
Germany, Russian will help me if I ever go to Moscow. It is simply a language, a subject
in school. In the case of German, it is required. Students do the requirement and get on
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with their lives. For some, like Kasia and Ryszard, the language requriement will
translate into a job: they now have another subject that they can teach.
Further, we are able to see that these Polish students understand the social
environment in which they are learning languages. They understand the attitudes that
exist and they feel, quite literally, the response of the larger population. Kasia reported
that she has often been asked why she would want to study Russian, since it is “out of
fashion” and the language of the enemy. English, on the other hand, does not present any
kind of “moral” Polish decision. Both the United States and the United Kingdom are
considered “neutral” countries and immigration to either would not be frowned upon by
the general population. None reported that they have been accosted by friends or relatives
for their love of the “oppressor” language that is English. With its wide blanket spread
around the world, it does not stand for one country or one people. It is, to them, the world
language.
As the researcher, able to step back and separate myself from the situation and
history, it appears that these students are able to look at language opposite the manner in
which some researchers conjecture: they are able to compartmentalize, to hold near and
dear their feelings of patriotism and love for their country, and in another mental
compartment, to seek to learn language, not allowing the two to cross. Perhaps Dornyei’s
(2001) supposition that second language acquisition requires the adoption of a new
identity or “the incorporation of a wide range of elements of the L2 culture” (p. 46) or
Gardner’s (1979) statement that students are not asked to learn “about” a language but
instead “acquire them” and thus “impose…another culture on one’s lifespace” (p. 193)
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hold when a learner is immersed in a new social and linguistic environment but does not
accurately describe the situation of a student studying a foreign language in a college
classroom. This situation is opposite the primary research of Schumann (1978a), in which
a person as an immigrant or short-term worker attempts to graft themselves into a new
environment, and thus demonstrates a much more extreme example of adopting a new
language and culture. For Schumann, the acquisition success of a Mexican attempting to
learn English in the United States will of course be dependent on his or her integrative
tendencies and in-groupness.
But is this all that there is? Are we really able to look at this situation and see it as
such a surface decision? When we look past what the students say—considering, after all,
the limitations inherent to an interview—we are able to notice that there is a slight
discrepancy between their words and their actions, and it is this: none of the students
have contact with speakers of German and Russian, apart from language teachers at the
university. Perhaps twenty years ago, limited by technology, this lack of contact would
have been normal and completely understandable. However, with the advent of the
internet and the connectivity and openness that it allows, from online language clubs, to
Facebook groups, to chat rooms and Skype conversation partners, it seems that a person
who seeks competence in a second language, would use the tools available to them to
seek out speakers of that language. Clément, Gardner, and Noels (1977) suggested that
those with positive attitudes would cause students to actively pursue contact with
individuals from that speaking community. The students told me that they frequently
accessed English-language media online, and Danuta even had a Spanish friend who she
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met through YouTube that she actively converses with over Skype. But still, for Danuta
and Ryszard, no Germans. For Kasia, no Russians.
None of the students informed me that they wanted to emigrate to either Germany
or Russia. Despite her intense love of the German language, Danuta wants to go to the
United States, her affection for German perhaps eclipsed by her affection for hippie
culture. Kasia wouldn’t mind visiting, even working for a few years, but knows finding a
good teaching job in Russia would be difficult, given the Russian culture’s often
xenophobic treatment of outsiders, and instead considers “going abroad” to another
European Union nation to be a better option. Maciej wants to leave Poland for America—
almost plans to—and wouldn’t possibly consider settling in Germany. Further, none of
the students have any contact with native speakers from those language groups: Kasia has
only communicated with Russian tourists—giving directions—and doesn't have Russian
friends. After nine years of learning the language, she still wishes to speak with a Russian
in order to test her skills. Even when working in Germany, Ryszard had little contact with
Germans. Instead, German functioned as the lingua franca between non-German workers
whose own native languages were disparate and different. It seems unlikely that Maciej,
with his intense dislike for the German language, would avidly seek out German contact.
Even Danuta would not approach the Germans that she met at an open, free-spirited
concert—Woodstock, no less, the crown of hippiedom.
Additionally, they do not pursue connections with the languages outside of
school. Kasia, as a Russian major, reads a great deal of literature from the Russian
Golden Age, the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but doesn’t watch or listen to
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Russian media. Danuta doesn’t read German magazines or newspapers, and even Ryszard
doesn’t have any contact with the language outside of the classroom, except (again, as
with Kasia) with the highbrow, hundred year-old culture of the Germany that once
existed in its classical musicians. All admit to using the internet to access Englishspeaking media, such as the BBC, Discovery Channel, and other American news and
television sources. But there is no mention of Der Spiegel, The Moscow Times, or
Deutsche Welle. Their rejection of these languages, it seems, is an unconscious decision
in that their actions appear to contradict, at least in some way, their words.
As mentioned earlier, Sorrentino (1996) referenced that concept of
unconsciousness, or attitudes forming within a person without relation to their conscious
decision-making. Their conscious action—the decisions that they clearly make, formed in
their mind—can often be a result of “unconscious forces…it can also occur by
association or by environmental cues” (p. 640). Thus, are the students’ unconscious
attitudes, gleaned from Polish culture, subtly impacting their decisions to action now?
One could easily look at this hypothesis and argue that the students simply aren’t
as interested in learning German as they are in learning English. By their own admission,
English is a much more useful language. But in the case of Kasia and Danuta, this does
not hold. Danuta wishes that she could spend more time studying German—yet does not
actively pursue it outside of the classroom. Kasia’s main focus is Russian—but, again,
outside of the classroom she does not pursue it in a way that would suggest she has an
attachment to it further than the attachment to any other school subject. Is it so wrong,
one might wonder, to regard a language as a school subject, the way that Americans and
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even this author regarded her own language learning experiences at university? Again,
we must look closer at the situation.
Here we have students who project liberal attitudes about acceptance and
forgetting the past, who don’t verbally associate German language with Nazis or Russian
with the soldiers who massacred Polish officers at Katyn and hid their atrocities for fifty
years. Instead, the culture and history, especially the history of the past hundred years
which accompany these languages, has been stripped down and removed, reducing each
to a lexicon and grammar, only a requirement and a mark at the end of the semester.
These students are not ignorant of history. Though Ryszard claimed that his
classmates were unaware of the actions of the past, the other three students, as a small
sample of his classmate population, were more than aware of the list of dates in Polish
history that decorate the many memorials found around the nation. 1772, first partition.
1793, second partition. 1795, third partition. 1830, November Uprising. 1848, Polish
Uprising. 1919, Polish-Russian war. 1939- German and Russian invasions of Poland.
They avoid the distinctions made by historians and politicians- no “Nazi Germany,” no
“Soviet Russia.” 1940, Katyn. 1944, Warsaw Uprising. The war ends 1945 with Poland
losing millions. The “Russian embrace,” as Maciej so poetically puts it, begins. They
have grown up with the stories. Every one of them had a grandparent with a story from
the war, either fighting as part of the Armia Krajowa or as a child, recalling soldiers in
their villages. Danuta remembers the dark times from her childhood, just after the fall of
the wall. Their country today, all of them admit, is not where they want it to be, with high
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unemployment, bad roads, and stamp-loving bureaucracy. And looking back, where does
that come from? History.
But how is possible to draw the connection between their knowledge,
comprehensive especially when compared to the historical memory of their American
counterparts, and their actions? Perhaps it isn’t, and evidence can be drawn instead from
their behavior: their integrative tendencies, their future goals, their present friends, their
media choices, the way that they spend their time. In word, it is easy to tow the liberal
line, given especially that as newly-minted members of the European Union, harmony
with neighbor states and fellow-Union members is something of a given, an attempt to
wipe clean the slates of the past. How, in a real-world sense, is reaction toward another
national or linguist group manifested?
Côté and Clément (1994) found a similar relationship regarding the macro context
environment in which a student functions, demonstrating that contact (or a lack of
contact) with members of the “foreign” group could have a relationship to the student’s
motivation in learning the language, though difficult to define. So where does this leave
us? Language, in the instances of these students, has obviously been divorced from
culture. Language is a subject. It has not been imposed on their lifespace because it has
not been allowed to. But there is no guidebook that comes attached to each student, and
even his or her own responses are not effective in understanding why language functions
in this way. With no clear cause-effect line that can be drawn between the two, we are
left to a hypothesis: perhaps, unwittingly and despite their liberal protests, the residual of
history is still evident.
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As will be demonstrated below, just as the lack of choice—anti-choice, as it is—is
factor itself, so the lack of contact and the lack of desire to pursue contact can be
construed as a conscious decision to avoid a language group or simply relegate the
language to a school subject, a textbook forgotten once the mark is in the book. However
it is read, these students are defying the conclusions of Dornyei, Gardner, and the like,
failing to adopt a part of the language as a new identity, failing to participate in that
“deeply social event” (Dornyei, 2001, p. 46). Given the gray area that exists in
understanding why the students are rejecting this second language identity, and if because
of historical issues they are doing it unconsciously, it is important to look at a clearer
cause-effect connection that can be drawn between student attitude and language choice.
In this case, it is the lack of choice that functions itself as a motivational antecedent.
The Lack of Choice
For Danuta and Ryszard, the lack of choice in language selection at the university
level manifested itself in that their langauge courses came, like their other lectures and
seminars, as part of a prescribed curriculum that they didn’t mind. Danuta appears to like
the idea of the German language and Ryszard likes any oppurtunity to learn langauges
and add to his growing repertoire. In both, we see respect for the language itself but we
do not see integrative aspirations. German is seen in isolation: divorced from the rest of
Germany, German citizens, and German culture.
In Maciej, and the nameless classmates which Danuta frequently referred to, the
lack of language selection isn’t seen as simply another class among the ten that they must
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take every semester. To Maciej, it is pain, it is agony, it is the representation of a system
that promises one thing while delivering another. Danuta’s classmates have a similar
reaction, in that they “hate it” and wish they could be studying another language. The
unconscious influence of German language, coupled with the fact that the students had no
language choice makes for a negatively charged outcome, most likely preempting their
continuation, or endurance, with the langauge. Those requried to take German at the
university—Maciej—would not have even made the decision to study German in the first
place. The language was a part of his high school curriculum and even though he had the
background of a few years, admittedly mild years during which he did not hate the
language, he still wanted to study something else. Were he given the option to continue
with language or to start something different, he would have chosen the latter. But there
was no choice: there was only German. And his indifference toward the language became
much stronger, bordering on and later giving into outright dislike.
But this problem, the lack of choice when it comes to German, runs much deeper
than simply language study in the Polish education system. The students at Jan
Kochanowski University, pursuing the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in English, do
not select any of their classes. They are in a class group, and that class group arrives at
school a week before the start of the semester to get not only their class list but their
schedule—the concept of a course list, published a year before that allows students to
build their education around their own calendar, is a foreign one. Students take
approximately ten classes per semester, each meeting for two hours per week, all set by
the administration depending on the teaching faculty available. American students face a
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similar situation, as every degree program has a structure of requirements and prerequisites, but nothing to this level. Most students find it impossible to have jobs outside
of class, given that their schedules are entirely dependent on the will of their professors.
If a teacher is unable to make a class, they will set a make-up time that fits their own
schedule, often not even considering the other classes that the students have. The current
approach in which students do not have control over the course of their own education
experience appears to be a leftover from the communist years or the byproduct of an
under-funded system, but whatever the reason, this study does demonstrate that students,
when denied the decisions that American students take for granted, develop bitter
attitudes. A teacher-centered environment that seems to consider the needs and the
autonomy of the students as second-rate should not be surprised when students approach
each class as hoop through which they are to jump—and not something that will impact
their lives for the better.
In the course of this study, I came to realize that I approach education and the
education environment from a very American perspective. I considered selection to be
the free choice that one has when given a number of options. Instead, I have come to a
different idea of selection. Instead of the physical act of choosing a class, as one might
from a university course catalog in the United States and arrive for the class with
textbook in hand, Polish students are left with an entirely mental choice, the choice to
dedicate themself to the language that they are directed to learn. Selection, it appears, has
more to do with language continuation or endurance, choosing to stay with the language
or to abandon it in pusuit of other academic ventures. We see this in Kasia, a person who
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originally struggled with Russian in high school but ultimatly developed enough
competence in the language that when faced with the great decision of a college course,
she chose to stay with Russian. Her open-minded attitude toward Russian culture, despite
her isolation from actual Russians, has no doubt aided her in acheiving success in the
subject. Maciej, the opposite, will only see failure.
Of course, the purpose of this study is not to pinpoint one factor that above all
others is responsible for a student’s decision making process. Instead, I aim to understand
the whole picture, the student as a distinct individual, and still take into account the social
factors that influence decision-making. This study points out some of the obvious
negatives that occur when students are not able to control their academic destiny, when
they are cleaved entirely from the decision-making process: leaners loose the autonomy
that helps them to pursue integrative atitudes or even set their own goals in the language,
instead of simply studying to pass an exam. For all the work that langauge teachers pour
into their classes, I’m sure they would be sad to see German or Russian education end the
moment the grade is in the book.
Researchers, both in the fields of psychology and linguistics, have dealt with the
concept of learner autonomy, suggesting that individuals with internalized goals in
language learning, even if they are taking into account the usual economic or extrinsic
factors, will be the determiners of their own motivation and exhibit positive, successful
intrinsic tendencies. One essential decider of self-determination, Deci and Ryan (1985)
explained, is autonomy, the ability to be the decider of your own behavior. Dornyei labels
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this as “experiencing oneself as the origin of one’s behavior” and agrees with Deci and
Ryan that this is among the most basic and “fundamental [of] human needs” (p. 29).
Most often in research dealing with learner autonomy the focus has been on the
microcosm of the classroom, where language lessons and the teachers themselves help
instill (or destroy) autonomy. Students tied to a textbook, for example, may not have the
same autonomy as students whose instructors make use of a variety of different methods,
increasing language exposure and learner participation. One example of research dealing
with learner autonomy was performed by psychologists Noels, Pelletier, Clement, &
Vallerand (2000), who through the usual means of a survey and a Likkert scale, made
correlations between intrinsic and extrensic motivation and the essential factors of
perceived competence, freedom of choice, personal anxiety, and future with the language.
“Freedom of choice” indicates that students perceive autonomy in the language learning
classroom, indicating whether or not they “experience a lot of freedom in learning a
second language,” aimed at divining whether the classroom situation provides an
environment that encourages active learner involvement. Not surprisingly, the researchers
found that those who were not allowed the freedom of choice also exhibited “low
perceptions” of their language competence, and both factors resulted in amotivation,
which they define as anti-motivation—no reason for doing something one way or
another—that will result in quitting as soon as possible (p. 76). At the other end of the
spectrum, they discovered that “the more internalized the reason for L2 learning, the
more comfortable and persevering students claimed to be,” suggesting that an
“autonomy-supportive environment” enables and increases the student’s “sense of
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competence because it is pleasurable or it appeals to their self concept” (p. 76). The
results seem like common sense: when allowed to do what you want, you are responsible
for your own actions and you will pursue what you want and enjoy. Similar conclusions
were reached by Dickinson (1995): when students are given self-determination, they
“[perceive] that their learning successes and failures are to be attributed to their own
efforts and strategies rather than to factors outside of their control” and a number of
studies demonstrate that “learning success and enhanced motivation is conditional on
learners taking responsibility for their own learning” (p. 173).
But no work has been able to draw a connection between learner autonomy and
the school itself, the broader system which exists in nearly all scholastic environments,
setting standards for curricular requirements. Dornyei (2001) points out this research
“black hole,” noting that so many studies call for it but no one has come forward to
propose research. “By examining school characteristics,” he adds, “we could understand,
for example, why, in certain language-learning contexts, state schools are rather
unsuccessful in developing the students’ L2 competence, whereas private
institutions…achieve considerable success” (p. 81-82). Though this study did not deal
directly with the higher, decision-making institution, the ramifications of those decisions
show obviously in the results of the students. Hopefully, the conclusions here drawn will
have some effect on the new generation of teachers emerging from the Polish education
system and possibly find its way up to the higher ranks to increase the control that
students have on their own educational process.
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Limitations of the Study
Before concluding, we must consider the inherent limitations of the methodology.
With a study such as this one considering such a vast environment that could be seen to
stretch back for a millenium, the limitations and weaknesses are exponential and should
be understood before taking conclusions at face value.
First, as presented earlier, when dealing with the vast field of motivational
research there are a number of innate challenges that accompany the field. Namely, we
cannot know whether the factors that influence a person’s behavior—place, culture,
environment—are in fact concious decisions to act one way or unconscious. Explaining
the relationship between a person’s environment and socio-cultural place complicate the
issue further, and the sheer size of the factors involved defy adequate mapping. Even
Dornyei (2001) admits that the “striking feature” of currently accepted motivation
theories “is their lack of comprehensiveness” and their inability to fully understand
motivation (p. 11).
But the limitations of this study are not simply because of the difficulty of the
field. It is important to note that the students were all interviewed by an individual, an
individual from a different culture in a position of power over them, as a university
instructor. This presents potential issues: I, the researcher, am not Polish and only
understand Poland through the lens of my own research and experience. The students,
while claiming honesty, could have skewed their answers in order to paint themselves,
their countrymen, or even the nation iteself in a certain light. They were asked a number
of questions about their feelings or reactions toward German and Russian aggression that
143
could have identified their own ethnocentric tendencies. Certain answers to these
questions such as to “what do you think about Germans?” could have elicited the sort of
response that a fair, balanced person might expect to hear: “oh, they are fine. I have no
problems with Germans.” This concept of reporter responsbility and openeness is further
contorted given that, despite our friendly relationships and closeness of age, I am still in a
position of authority over them as their instructor. Who would say to their instructor, who
will in a month’s time assign a grade to their classroom progress, that they detest
Americans, disapprove of the hegemonic reign of the English language, or feel that
Polish is being marginalized in favor of an imperialist tongue? While these hypothetical
reactions may seem extreme, especially for students who did originally have some choice
in selecting English as their major, it is important to remember that the presence of an
interviewer will nearly always have an affective impact on the answers given.
Further, this study relies on just one instrument of data collection: the interview.
From the interviews, there is only one set of data. I am also aware of the limitations that
accompany case studies in general: when looking at such a broad picture with the number
of factors present when inquiring about something so complex as motivation, conclusions
are drawn based on general trends that the researcher notices in the data available. This is
by no means a quanititative investigation, drawing a line between a specific cause and an
even more specific effect, and was never meant to be seen as such: instead, this study is
meant to explore the situation of Polish students.
144
Whatever results can be drawn from this study concerning the historical and
administration level-impact on student motivation are only a start. Since this study sought
to give a picture, not point a direct finger at any factor, further research is needed to
determine the result of lack of choice. A longitudinal study that looks at learner
persistance following mandatory language classes would shed light on whether
administrative decisions help or hurt students’ long-term language aquisition. Do the
choices made at the top of the ladder, by principals and deans, actually negatively impact
students’ language learning? Do students attitudes shift to the negative because of
decisions from the top? Dornyei called for more research in this regard, and I must
second him.
Conclusion
In the past few decades, since Gardner and Lambert first unleashed the Attitude
and Motivation Test Battery on the world of second language instruction, the vast
majority of motivational research has focused creating concise, quantitative studies that
attempt to map out the many factors that impact a student’s motivational course. The glut
of research in the field has sought to create a framework by which to understand these
factors, with varying degrees of success. Just as the definition of motivation presents a
challenge, mapping it presents a messy concept, often one that cannot be expressed in a
few words.
When it comes to understanding motivation, I must subscribe to a line of thought
that views each student as an individual with their own individual dimensions which in
145
turn shape their attitude in approaching another language. But of course, the individuality
of motivation patterns does little to help the language teacher; the person to whom I
believe the bulk of research should be directed. The research, even with tables and scales
of one to ten, suggests patterns that, though divorced from the individual, suggest a
course of action. The same can be said of this study. The opinions of our students ought
to be the most important: despite their desire for good marks and eventual diplomas, they
are the most responsible reporters of educational quality. In the current educational
climate of Poland, very involved with the assignment of titles upon their professors and
less with the needs of the actual students they serve, students are detached from the
processes which decide their classes, their hours, and, though it may seem somewhat
dramatic, even their educational fate. Such a system cannot claim to turn out students
who are capable of problem-solving or critical thinking. Students at this university, as I
have found, are deserving of educational autonomy, and until the system sees drastic
changes, will labor still under a framework that does not instill personal responsibility, or,
as a result, self-determined intrinsic motivation.
This aspect, learner autonomy, creates a very real and present challenge for
students in that they see what their system lacks and they are able to attribute, in a very
real way, their own negative attitudes to the framework of the university system. A
student who wants to study Spanish and instead is forced into a German classroom can
pinpoint, for themselves and in their own words, the reason that they don’t like to study
German: because they have to and they don’t want to. To students, this is the most
146
tangible dimension, easy for them to point to the leather-covered door of the dean’s office
and say, “That’s why I hate German.” But of course, motivation is not so simply defined.
Beyond the matter of learner autonomy, there still remains the issue of Polish
history and the baggage of the past that creates the need to compartmentalize and prevent
students, at least those presented here, to fully immerse themselves in the study of a
language. Students, even if they do not feel any personal vendetta against the current
inhabitants of Russia and Germany still live in a country where social stigma obviously
thrives with a national distrust of the Germans and Russians that surely play a role in
preventing students from actively seeking out connections to these nationalities, and, as a
result, developing their language skills outside of the classroom. The stigma,
demonstrated in the very nationalistic bend evident in research such as Weiss (2003),
manifests itself in that Russia is still the eastward bear, recently illustrated on the Polish
Newsweek cover as perched atop the gas pipeline that runs through Poland, cutting off
Europe in order to keep its power relevant. Students, especially this generation and the
next who were born after the fall of communism and may, in later years, come to regard
Russia in the way that Americans regard the British with all thoughts of preindependence colonialism far in the past.
In word, the students know and understand what they should say, what a peaceful
democracy in the European Union should repeat about its neighbor, what a progressive,
open-minded individual should believe about another group of people. The past is in the
past, as are those involved in it. But is it possible to truly let it go when you know all of
147
the details? When every anniversary, be it the sixtieth anniversary of the German and
Russian invasions in 2009, the Katyn massacre in 2010, or fifty-five years for the end of
the Second World War is marked with red and white carnations at the base of every
statue and prayer votives on every grave?
This is bound to change, given years: the Polish education system, an important
part of society, will begin to capitulate to a more modern approach as the older
professors, the stalwarts of the old communist system, retire and leave. Already,
modernization and a shift toward the Bologna university style is setting in, with the class
interviewed as the second group to graduate under new requirements. But changes still
need to come, both in structure and ideology, in order to allow Polish students to fully
take part in something so “socially and culturally bound” and view their languagelearning experience not as a requirement to be ticket off the class schedule but to take
part in Dornyei’s (2001) “deeply social event” (p. 46). To be allowed, either by society or
by themselves, to find enjoyment and satisfaction in the learning of a second language
and the adoption a fragment of new identity contained therein.
Until then, Polish students will continue to see these languages—German and
Russian—as simple subjects, something to study, something to get them somewhere in
life. In a country such as Poland, whose independence and self-determined government is
just now celebrating its twentieth anniversary, perhaps this is not such a bad thing.
Students who speak a little German may move higher up the ladder in their workplaces,
or be able to get jobs with foreign companies where the pay and benefits far outweigh
148
working for a similar Polish organization. Kasia and Ryszard will be able to teach
Russian or German, respectively, at the secondary level to Polish students and will no
doubt find success. Maciej will be able to move to the U.S. and probably never touch
German again, except in the unlikely event that he travels to Germany for vacation. And
Danuta, after university, will most likely see her German deteriorate further as she moves
on with her life, possibly in the States, working within the English-speaking sector.
But what message does that ultimately send? Is language, with hours of study in
school, not worth the time that it is allotted? The point of making students learn a
language, I would argue, is to give them a skill that they will use later in life. Devoid of
choice, this action downgrades a language such as German, endowed with the culture and
society that makes it a worthwhile world language, to a grade in a class. Language
retention seems unlikely.
This study, in presenting the image of four students and their reactions to the
languages that they learn, we can see how society, academic institutions, and even the
teachers themselves need to work to foster an environment that encourages advancement
and learning. Ushioda (2001), through extensive qualitative research, sought to look at
motivation not as a “measurable cause” but as an “ongoing complex of process shaping
and sustaining learner involvement in learning” (p. 94). In this new definition, motivation
is not simply the product of a myriad of factors but instead an ongoing, malleable
concept.
149
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