Language Ideologies and English Language Teaching in Poland

The recent rise of neo-nationalism in Europe is a widely discussed and researched topic (e.g., Gingrich, 2006), with Poland gaining more and more attention from both journalists and scholars since its populist right-wing ruling party, Law and Justice (Tepper, 2018) came to power in 2015. In fact, the Polish government has been one of the most vocal in the European Union (EU) in enacting anti-immigration policies during the Syrian refugee crisis. The Law and Justice party has also been blamed for reiterating xenophobic and homophobic discourses, and for embracing a nationalistic, anti-Western political agenda. In many ways, the ruling party’s focus on preserving the status quo, including ethnic and religious homogeneity, goes against multilingual and multicultural values and policies of the EU. Despite growing research on neo-nationalism in Poland, no studies to date have examined the potential impact of these values and discourses on foreign language teaching, especially in terms of how teachers perceive their role in promoting multilingualism and multiculturalism. While it is well-acknowledged that foreign language teaching always has an ideological component, we still do not know how the current political climate in Poland and Europe influences English language teaching. In our presentation, we report the results of a study in which we interviewed five English language instructors in Poland at various educational levels. The participants shared their views on the role of multiculturalism and multilingualism in their teaching vis-a-vis rising neo-nationalism in Poland and in Europe. We found that teachers mostly aligned themselves with EU’s values but that these values only implicitly impacted their teaching philosophy, rather than explicitly informed their teaching methods. We discuss these findings in light of recent social and immigration debates in Poland, which we argue play a role in the teaching and learning of foreign languages.