The author presents aesthetic and patriotic education in secondary schools in the old Polish province of Galicia (south-eastern Poland, formerly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) on the basis of school records, memory books and students’ recollections. She has taken into account both curricular and extracurricular teaching activities that aim at developing students’ personalities. The subject of her analysis is students’ Polish papers and remarks concerning the fulfillment of educational aims. The author also attempts to evaluate literature teaching in connection with aesthetic and patriotic education in those schools.

The article begins with the discussion of aims and significance of learning literary texts by heart. Then the author makes a survey of selected Polish teaching syllabuses for the newly reformed elementary schools. Against this background, she presents the results of her own studies based on the questionnaires given to both Polish teachers and schoolchildren. This has allowed the author to make frequency lists of texts learned by heart, to show the selection motivations, teachers’ and students’ preferences, and the ways these texts are used at school. In her conclusion, the author claims that learning literary texts by heart may encourage schoolchildren to read more.

The author shows the intertextual game of two modern texts referring to the Book of Genesis story about Lot’s rescue and his wife turned into a pillar of salt. The focus of both these poems is on the wife. Szymborska treats that biblical character as the subject, about whom rather little is known apart from the fact that she was turned into a pillar of salt. She tried to find the reasons why Lot’s wife failed to obey God’s prohibition. Answering a number of ‘why’ questions, Szymborska built up a psychologically probable image of a woman at a loss, whose motivation cannot be evaluated unequivocally. On the other hand, Łobodowski refers to the romantic tradition. The author of this article shows how biblical style builds up Lot’s wife as ‘the most beautiful symbol of love’, simultaneously opening a game with the mythological symbol of Niobe. Additional context for the detailed analysis of both these poems has been provided by reference to Pasierb’s poem with the identical title Lot’s Wife.

The author gives some suggestions for teachers who might use in their classes a collection of stories Zabezpieczenie śladów written by Włodzimierz Odojewski. This example shows that such work with a whole story collection might encourage students to read modern prose on their own. The analysis of the collection might draw their readers’ attention to such marking points as mottos, titles, dates of writing, etc. It will also help them to treat the collection as a whole and to find some exponents of the cycle, e.g. the structure of the volume, narration, the protagonist, time, space. In this way, students may be prompted to try and discover main ideas and problems found in all the stories. Finally, they might be encouraged to study the differences in interpretation resulting from the fact that a story may be analyzed either independently or as an element of a cycle.

Reference books (handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries), newspapers and magazines are the basic elements of students’ self-education. The most significant variables of students’ interest in these publications are social background, curiosity of the world, cognitive aspirations, readiness to learn new things, much better stimulated by the media than by school.

It is important that schoolchildren identify and make use of elements of linear text cohesion, e.g. anaphors, cataphors, ellipsis, syntactic parallels, which make texts more economical but, on the other hand, may hinder communication.

The author presents the results of cognitive tests conducted among secondary school students of final classes in the Silesian region. She aimed to find out how students understand the notion of truth and what kind of linguistic picture of truth they have. For most of them, truth is a value, a norm of behaviour, a necessary element of good life. The students are aware of the fact that this value is losing its strength nowadays and that human life has been affected by relativization. Only for a very small number of students is truth an anti-value, something that is out of date and makes life difficult.

The author presents modern tendencies in the use of Polish punctuation and postulates some changes in prescriptive norms. The corpus analysis (of 1999 Polish press) has shown two tendencies that run against the norm: leaving out the comma and expansion of the hyphen and of the slash. Common punctuation mistakes are the evidence of the lessening role of formal, syntactic factors. The author believes that future punctuation norm should be more flexible and allow writers to use punctuation in accordance with their intentions.

The author draws the reader’s attention to words of foreign origin found in handbooks and other books used at school by children aged 7–9. One of the ways of enriching children’s lexicon should be proper vocabulary exercises. In the first part, we find the discussion of the statistical analysis of foreign words found in the books meant for Class One, Two and Three. Then, phrases with foreign lexemes are identified and used as a basis for exercises aimed at helping children understand and remember loanwords.

The author presents the theoretical and methodological issues connected with the phonic presentation of fragments of the 16th century drama Odprawa posłów greckich (The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys) by Jan Kochanowski. She pays special attention to elocution exercises, which, she believes, have a significant role in teaching proper expression and in emphasizing the ‘beauty of the word’.

Polański E., Iwanowicz M., Słownictwo i frazeologia w szkole. Wiadomości, ćwiczenia, testy dla gimnazjów i szkół średnich, Łódź 1999.

Ożóg K., Pasterska J. (red.), Polonistyka zintegrowana, Rzeszów 2000.

Dydaktyka 5, red. Kurczab H., Rzeszów 1998.
Dydaktyka 6, red. Kurczab H., Rzeszów 1999.

Kawka M., Dyskurs szkolny. Zagadnienia języka, Kraków 1999.