Dear Members of NAATPl, 

It is our pleasure to invite you to our second webinar led by Prof. Izolda Wolski-Moskoff from The Ohio State University.  The title and abstract of the presentation is below; it will be followed by a Q&A session.  The webinar will take place on Saturday, March 14th at 11am CST (Chicago) and we will again meet on WebEx. I will resend the invitation a day before the meeting, to remind everyone interested in “attending” how to log in and join the meeting. 

Izolda Wolski-Moskoff

Ohio State University / NAATPl President

Title:

Mój tato skończył technikum kontraktorskie. Lexical borrowings and grammatical divergencies in the Polish heritage language

Description:

The focus of the webinar will be twofold – the findings of an empirical study, and pedagogical implications based on these results. Conducted in Chicago, the study investigated the case use and knowledge of twenty-five Polish heritage speakers. The results show that all oblique cases are preserved in the speech of the advanced heritage speakers, albeit occurring less frequently therein than in standard Polish. The lower-proficiency speakers’ decreased accuracy, meanwhile, may signify that the grammatical systems of these speakers operate on the syntactic rules of the dominant language (i.e., English). Additionally, the results show that problems with lexical retrieval may increase difficulties with case-ending remembering which points to the interconnections between the two. 

Since heritage speakers still make up a considerable part of enrollments in Polish courses in the United States, the results of the empirical study are of great value for Polish language teachers. Armed with a better understanding of the grammatical competency as well as vocabulary knowledge of Polish heritage speakers, one can design better curricula for them, focusing on the vulnerable parts of heritage grammar. In the second part of the webinar, I will suggest some activities/approach that may address these vulnerable areas of the Polish heritage language.Bests, NAATPl

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