scholarly journals TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: A CASE STUDY FROM POLAND

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-182
Author(s):  
JAROSLAW R. ROMANIUK ◽  
KRISTIN MILLER ◽  
MARY KAY PIESKI ◽  
TERESA G. WOJCIK ◽  
KATHLEEN J. FARKAS

This article presents a detailed history of the development of a particular immersion program to teach English to young Polish students. The program draws support from two organizations, the Kościuszko Foundation and the Polish Scouting Organization. Kościuszko Foundation is dedicated to strengthening the ties between the United States and Poland as well as to increase knowledge of Poland’s history and culture in the United States. The cooperation of these two organizations developed an experience of immersion in language and cultural exchange. Both the teachers and the students in this program benefited from the opportunity to engage in a number of different types of language activities and cultural events through a summer camp experience. This program is, of course, unique, but the elements of context, culture and immersion could be used in other programs to develop English skills and knowledge in the context American culture.

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Edward Philips

AbstractJapan's quest for a permanent United Nations Security Council seat could be expected to lead to an increased importance for foreign language and area studies in Japan, as it did in the United States. This is particularly the case with Japan, an insular nation proud of its homogeneity with little history of immigration. Despite the inherently greater difficulties for Japan in trying to understand the outside world, there has been little increase in attempts to understand the outside world when compared to the efforts made by the United States, which started with several advantages over Japan. The example of African history is a case study of Japan's failure to interact with the wider world of international scholarship and its perpetuation of discredited ideas.


Author(s):  
Anne Searcy

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11 (109)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Vladimir Pechatnov

Based on previously unearthed documents from the Russia’s State Historical Archive and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire the article explores the history of the first Russian Orthodox parish in New York City and construction of Saint-Nickolas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the city. It was a protracted and complicated interagency process that involved Russian Orthodox mission in the United States, Russia’s Foreign Ministry and its missions in the United States, the Holy Governing Synod, Russia’s Ministry of Finance and the State Council. The principal actors were the bishops Nicholas (Ziorov) and especially Tikhon (Bellavin), Ober-Prosecutor of the Holy Governing Synod Konstantine Pobedonostsev and Reverend Alexander Khotovitsky. This case study of the Cathedral history reveals an interaction of ecclesiastical and civil authorities in which private and civic initiative was combined with strict bureaucratic rules and procedures.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mallory Lapointe Taylor

Within the United States, the American South can be perceived as its own entity. From the arts to Southern cuisine, the South commands attention with its own history, myths and culture. Within the history of photography, Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama are arguably some of the most culturally significant images taken of the state and its residents. This thesis investigates how photographs of Alabama are collected in the same locality. By examining the collecting practices of four Alabama institutions in regards to photographs in general, and Walker Evans specifically, this case study will expand on the question of how photographs, in a Southern cultural context, work to create a sense of place and attachment to local geography.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 126-138
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld

Although contrastive studies do not enjoy great prestige among linguists, they have a very long tradition dating back to ca. 1000 A.D. when Ælfric wrote his Grammatica, a grammar of Latin and English. Even then he must have been aware of the fact that the knowledge of one language may be helpful in the process of learning another language (Krzeszowski 1990). Similarly, it seems that throughout the history of mankind teachers of a foreign language must have realized that a native and foreign tongue can be contrasted. However, contrastive linguistics only came into being as a science at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The first works were almost purely theoretical, and it is worth emphasizing that among the first scholars working in the field was Baudouin de Courtenay, a Polish linguist, who published his contrastive grammar of Polish, Russian and Old Church Slavonic in 1912. The outbreak of the Second World War was a milestone in the development of applied contrastive studies since a need to teach foreign languages in the United States arose as a result. The 1960’s is considered a further step in the development of contrastive grammar since a number of projects were initiated both in Europe and in the U.S.A. (Willim, Mańczak-Wohlfeld 1997), which resulted in the introduction of courses in English-Polish contrastive grammar at Polish universities. The aim of the present paper is to characterize and evaluate the courses offered in the English departments of selected Polish universities and to suggest an “ideal” syllabus.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL LEVINSON WILK

Modern people are obsessed with money, but the practice of tipping a waiter or chambermaid is a counterbalance against money’s tendency to infect human relations. People who tip infect money back, with nonmonetary values. This article provides a general history of tips investing money and monetary exchange with ideals such as status, dignity, waste, care, and play, in certain parts of the United States, c. 1880–1929. It also offers a case study of railroad red caps’ tips in the five years following passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938; when tipping declined, it reduced red caps’ ability to invest their work with nonmonetary values.


Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa

Historian John Higham once referred to anti-Catholicism as “by far the oldest, and the most powerful of anti-foreign traditions” in North American intellectual and cultural history. But Higham’s famous observation actually elided three different types of anti-Catholic nativism that have enjoyed a long and quite vibrant life in North America: a cultural distrust of Catholics, based on an understanding of North American public culture rooted in a profoundly British and Protestant ordering of human society; an intellectual distrust of Catholics, based on a set of epistemological and philosophical ideas first elucidated in the English (Lockean) and Scottish (“Common Sense Realist”) Enlightenments and the British Whig tradition of political thought; and a nativist distrust of Catholics as deviant members of American society, a perception central to the Protestant mainstream’s duty of “boundary maintenance” (to utilize Emile Durkheim’s reading of how “outsiders” help “insiders” maintain social control). An examination of the long history of anti-Catholicism in the United States can be divided into three parts: first, an overview of the types of anti-Catholic animus utilizing the typology adumbrated above; second, a narrative history of the most important anti-Catholic events in U.S. culture (e.g., Harvard’s Dudleian Lectures, the Suffolk Resolves, the burning of the Charlestown convent, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures); and finally, a discussion of American Catholic efforts to address the animus.


1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald J. Mabry

The record industry in the United States was controlled until the 1950s by a half dozen major companies, which produced music directed primarily toward the white middle class. The following article uses the history of Ace Records, a small, regional, independent company, to examine the nature of the record industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explains the shifts in demography and technology that made possible the growth of the independents, as well as the obstacles and events that made their demise more likely. It also traces the changes that such companies, by recording and promoting rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, introduced to the cultural mainstream.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-431
Author(s):  
JOSHUA S. WALDEN

AbstractJascha Heifetz (1901–87) promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece “Hora Staccato,” based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled “Hora Swing-cato.” Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley–style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.


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