Technology has been called to the rescue on a number of occasions, be it in large classes, under-resourced contexts, after earthquakes or other natural disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic which struck the whole world in Spring 2020 afterwards necessitated a sudden shift from face-to-face to distance teaching. With no preparation, no training and very…

Online virtual worlds are becoming important tools in foreign/second language instruction in view of the fact that they enhance learner motivation, promote autonomy and social presence in a 3D environment. Virtual worlds are a type of reality in which students can meet and communicate with other learners in the target language using text, voice or…

Students' lack of school success often lies in the differences between the language used at home and the "school language" they are required to use at school. A framework was drawn up in which five domains are distinguished where specific problems might be located: language-internal aspects (mastery of vocabulary, grammar, etc.),…

Form-focused instruction is usually based on traditional practical/pedagogical grammar descriptions of grammatical features. The comparison of such traditional accounts with cognitive grammar (CG) descriptions seems to favor CG as a basis of pedagogical rules. This is due to the insistence of CG on the meaningfulness of grammar and its detailed…

The aim of the paper is to analyse the relation between educational struggles and citizenship education in contemporary Poland. It adopts the critical pedagogy perspective and broadly defines the concept of educational struggle as struggling over the content of education, as social tensions in the field of education, as well as the students' and…

Since 2004, Ireland has experienced the arrival of immigrants from various countries from all over the world including Poland. The Polish came to Ireland with their families including children of school age obliged to attend compulsory education. These children have attended schools dissimilar from the ones they are accustomed to in their home…

The paper presents the results of a study whose main aim was to investigate the effectiveness of using Internet resources and a browser-based virtual world in helping a group of students to learn the English second conditional. The sample consisted of thirteen third year students studying English at a Polish senior high school. The data were…

The teacher's role is vital, both in respect to achieving academic goals, and with regard to the regulation of emotional and social processes. Positive perceptions of teacher support can endorse psychological wellness, and help maintain students' academic interests, higher academic achievement and more positive peer relationships. The teacher who…

This paper analyzes the relationship between communication apprehension and language anxiety from the perspective of gender. As virtually no empirical studies have addressed the explicit influence of gender on language anxiety in communication apprehensives, this paper proposes that females are generally more sensitive to anxiety, as reflected in…

The chapter reports the results of a controlled experiment which suggest that foreign-language grammar instruction that forges explicit connections with the grammar of the students' mother tongue aids learning, at least as far as students' application of discrete-point grammar rules is concerned. (Contains 2 figures and 3 notes.) [This document…

Polish students learn about Platonic solids in the final year of secondary grammar school, but in such a way that few perceive the beauty of this branch of mathematics. An average student associates polyhedra with calculating lengths and angles in a cube, cuboid or pyramid. But for the author, 3-D geometry is the branch of mathematics that shows…

This article compares Polish post-secondary vocational (grammar) schools with Canadian community colleges. Accessibility, governance and programs are discussed. The theoretical framework for this comparison was supplied by the notion of the school as an organization and social institution. We found that it is necessary for educators in both Canada…

The paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study which was conducted with a view to determining the effect of an intervention in the form of the application of teacher-designed Internet-based resources (i.e., websites, podcasts, movie clips) that students could use autonomously on the development of pronunciation of the English regular…