Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The focus of the paper is on the views of learners and teachers on foreign language learning at school. The theoretical basis for the description of the formation and the explanation of these views is constituted by the sociocultural theory of second language acquisition, which is related to the ideas of Vygotsky and Bakhtin. The views of learners are of polyphonic nature: they are resultants of personal and common experiences, own voices and the voices of others, who in the language class form communities with their own rules and division of work. The attention centres on three aspect of the views: a) on the essential nature of language, b) on the essential nature of language as learning object, and c) on the image of a foreign language lesson. The examples of views quoted in this paper are derived from scholarly literature as well as from the unpublished data collected by the paper’s author.