English philology
by Andrew Osobka
At most universities in Poland an English philology student spends endless hours on studying subjects like “speaking”, “listening”, “reading”, “writing” and grammar, which are supposed to prepare him/her linguistically, so that the student is fully competent in terms of understanding and wielding the target language at the end of the course. Of course, this wishful assumption hardly ever becomes reality. A typical graduate, after having in the neighborhood of 900 hours of lessons during their BA course, will display a linguistic competence similar to that of a CAE student, who has never wasted so much time and received a diploma in, for instance, nuclear biology while treating the study of English as a hobby with no stressful exams. So why study English philology then? Among typical subjects there is history of England (about four months – a kind of crush course during which you will learn how to prepare a crib for the final exam since it’s impossible to learn the history of England in such a short period of time) , history of the USA (pretty much as the previous), psychology (after all you have to be capable of psychobabbling your potential students), philosophy (you’re dead without it. The whole year spent on learning different divisions of philosophy, which you will forget after getting a passing mark), American culture (learn American geography, what people eat and how they think – four months. Imagine that it takes American the whole lifetime to do this), British culture (same as the previous but this time you can thoroughly get to know the Brits – laughable), methodology (learn all the teaching methods that nobody uses- but c’mon, you might be the first one to show the whole world that they don’t work), phonology and phonetics (a good idea but wasted. You should have these for the entire time of your studies), history of English language (a year course that could be a single lecture), pedagogy (I don’t even remember what it is about), syntax (grammar – but due to lack of time, will only show you different divisions of the parts of speech), contrastive grammar (showing the difference between your mother tongue and English), British literature (the whole year – amazing that you can go through literary periods of British literature so fast. Note that you will read and analyze all the important works of each – not!), American literature (it’s a trash! Like everything American!), and the most favorite of all – glottodidactics (a sort of methodology but treated as a different subject – translate it as a waste of time). At the end of the BA course, you will have to write your diploma paper under the supervision of one of the equally competent PHD’s who obliterated the difference between the long and short vowels probably during their BA studies. The topic of your paper will be limited to a single area or if you are lucky, you will get a choice, perhaps between literature and methodology? You’ll write your paper, incorporating no creative ideas, which you are not allowed to have at this point – after all, it’s not a PhD dissertation. You will hear plenty of instructions about how to write this very important paper, most of which, here comes a shock, will refer to the size of margins, type of font, numbering pages, and references, plenty of references – not just from Brown or Harmer, whose language is too infantile and too common. You will have to use the formal style and under no circumstance insert a single “I” in the paper. With this legalized hardcover plagiarism you will go for the defense of someone’s ideas, which now are sort of semi-yours. Flowers, cookies, coffee, and plenty of kissing-up will get you the diploma that a CAE student doesn’t have but knows the language to the same extent.
Does it sound like fun? What has the typical student actually learned? In short, a lot of words that he/she could learn at home without attending any classes. Of course, he/she might have learned from their teachers some badly pronounced words, which in methodology are referred to as fossilized errors (remember this term ‘cause you might hear it a lot when you decide to join the ranks of philology students).
English philology in Poland is just a huge misunderstanding. It is enshrined with a commie thinking that can’t be eradicated from the minds of professors who still have an enormous amount of sentiment for the collapsed system, the system which let them keep the students in shackles of pointlessly stuffed curricula whose intention is not to teach but to fill a potential gap. To keep the students busy with anything, forgetting to teach them the most important thing – creativity and independence.
To sum up, all of the courses can be described as speedy and meaningless, except for the gems like “reading”, “speaking”, “listening”, “writing”, and grammar, which are unnatural due to the artificiality of the situation in which they are always to take place, which makes them miss their purpose and become a total waste of time. To shower them with adjectives like speedy and meaningless is tantamount to insulting the very terms.
Looking at the material for students, I sometimes wonder how easy it is to change the system and make the study more interesting and meaningful, how to make it more American (not in terms of the accent – thought it’s nothing wrong with the idea), and more normal.
Mister To-Whom-It-May-Concern, structure the schedule around the literature, history, grammar, and phonology. A three-year course in literature, both British and American, can provide enough time for students to actually learn something besides giving them an opportunity to read literary works and speak about them (there are your reading, writing , and speaking classes). So it is in case of learning British and American history. Introduce creative writing, so that the students can write about their own ideas and acquire some literary skills. A three-year course in phonology – Make the students learn the sounds of the target language. Syntax is grammar – don’t separate the two. Make the students learn English like at American colleges, through activities involving history, literature, or methodology (more practical than theoretical). Get rid of this glotto-something – it sounds like a bad disease. Forget about so-called “speaking” classes where students spend time on describing pictures (what a vastness of aimlessness!). Forget about “reading” as a subject - Did you have it in Polish? - yeah, in the first grade). And surely forget about “listening” as a subject – borders with the pathetic, an emblem of the past generation of philologists. Make the standard of admission at least at the CAE proficiency level and conduct all lectures in English (by professors who know the language and not those who have received their university post through nepotism just because they happen to have a cousin working there). And reconsider the testing system. The every-year so-called “practical exam” is a means of expressing your professors’ insecurities about their own linguistic abilities – out with it !
And save yourself plenty of anguish and embarrassment by making the system look like and feel like a BA course that can be attended even by the native speakers of English.