Poetry as a de-fossilizing force in teaching Polish grammar to the advanced users of Polish as a foreign language

The aim of the paper is to suggest ways of using poetry as a defossilizing force motivating students to reflect on grammar and its most problematic issues. Having presented learners’ fossilized language competence in terms of grammar, involving examples of inaccuracies and/or understatements manifested by the advanced learners of Polish as a foreign language (146 students of the Polish Language Course attending the School of Polish Language and Culture at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland), suggestions for teachers of Polish as a foreign language and students themselves are offered. These include a few examples of activities based on poems believed to be perfect de-fossilizing teaching materials.


Introduction
Considered in terms of what words and how words chain together to convey the meaning, grammar manifests itself in patterns, structures and orientations that are very often difficult to figure out (Willis 2005). Apparently, it becomes more and more troublesome at higher levels of linguistic development when the students' contact with grammar is more text rather than sentence based, and authentic language use they come in contact with operates on language-specific social and pragmatic norms that are simply too subtle to conceptualize consciously. What is needed in such a situation requires serious thought given to linguistic units, or, more specifically, grammatical as-pects hidden in the text. The best way to do it in a text-based instruction is by means of poetry evoking a concentrated awareness of experience and/or a specific emotional response to the language and through the language being offered.

Poetry in a foreign language classroom
Following Szczęśniak (2009), poetry in teaching a foreign language is treated as an innovative potential aimed at developing students' linguistic and cognitive competences. In the former case, a well-prepared material, in the form of a text, is to influence lexis, grammar and morphology, as well as to become the basis of enhancing students' listening, reading, speaking and writing skills. The latter, on the other hand, giving social, cultural, and historical background, allows for acting, thinking and feeling in a foreign language, including openness to other languages, cultures and communities. Kozłowski (1991) goes even further and compares using poetry in a classroom to a multidimensional experience and a powerful effect on learners' literary, emotional, creative, aesthetic or critical competences, to name a few.
The more "attractive" the poem, the bigger influence on its receivers can be observed. What constitutes this text attractiveness is elaborated on by Burzyńska and Markowski (2006), according to whom it composes of directiveness, clarity, or, paradoxically, the lack of both, as well as thought-provoking and innovative ideas, or a metaphorical nature of the language itself.
More specifically, these are distinctive features of poetical texts, such as e.g. rhythms, rhymes, onomatopoeic expressions, assonances and alliterations that enrich the way the message is conveyed and the language in general is portrayed at the same time.
Working on a poetical text, as Szczęśniak (2009) has it, can start from just underlining given words to direct learners' attention to their spelling. Looking for prefixes or suffixes, di-minutives and/or augmentatives, analogically, is to raise students' awareness of word formation and morphology. In the same vein, when asked to concentrate on certain parts of speech, such as verbs, nouns or adjectives and adverbs, the learners may develop their understanding of word order, as well as how words representing these parts of speech co-exist and form a larger unit referred to as a sentence.
The next step can be reading a poem and working on substituting given words or phrases, transforming parts and/or whole sentences, as well as coming up with new units. Practically, it may cover practicing plurals/singulars, inflections, tenses etc. Finally, the students may be asked to reflect on word or sentence relations, ponder over their double or metaphorical meaning, as well as go for writing their own lines according to suggested patterns, or just become involved into free writing as such. Being so diversified, poetry seems to be a part of not only a very interesting text-based task to implement during regular classes, but also a series of remedy classes when something goes wrong.

Types of poems
Taking all the above-mentioned into account, it is worth emphasizing that different poems serve different purposes, and can be used differently to promote language acquisition. The most common poem forms are picture poems and pattern poems.

Picture poems
According to Finch (2003), picture poems offer a visual perspective on the arrangement of words, and are, therefore, an effective means of encouraging learners to interact with the target vocabulary. How to do it in practice is perfectly explained by Mrożek (1999) -see Figure 1.

Figure 1
An example of a picture poem (Mrożek 1999: 125) Such poems look like the object they describe. The structure is the shape of the object, and task completion comes from arranging words to match that shape.
Another type of a picture poem is the one in which the words outline the object being described. Again, these words can be sentences or collections of word-associations, and, thus, encourage the learners to interact and experiment with the language. One of the experiments is presented by Mrożek (1999) -see Figure 2. 80 Beyond Philology 17/1

Figure 2
An example of a calligram poem (Mrożek 1999: 132) Practically speaking, it means that in order to create it the students may be asked to think of a given word, and present the line that appears to bound a given object.

Pattern poems
Pattern poems, on the other hand, are believed to be especially successful in the foreign language classroom as they can be adopted to teaching grammar and sentence structure. Following Finch (2003), patterns in such poems usually consist of grammatical items (adjectives, adverbs, verbs etc.) metrical frameworks, phrases, or sentence structures, though they can also include acronyms. The very example offered by Mrożek (1999) shows a broad scope of the entries to be produced by the students giving them virtually a free hand (see Figure 3).

Figure 3
An example of a pattern poem (Mrożek 1999: 123) Such experiments with the language guarantee not only great fun, but also a remedy for language mistakes which are the result of language fossilization and/or other problems.

Fossilization
Fossilization, being among other things, defined as a propensity for language behaviours lacking appropriate forms and features, takes on different forms reflecting its diversity and complexity.
More specifically, ultimate attainment stands for the end state the advanced learners reach well on their way to learning a language, denoting, at the same time, the lack of potential for further development. This inability to improve and/or develop in the language recurs under the label of a widelyunderstood non-progression or cessation of learning. Crucial as these notions are to the phenomenon of fossilization, they are not the only ones. As can be seen in the last two explanations, much of the onus also falls on a permanent retention and reappearance of (correct and/or incorrect) language habits and forms within the fossilized language competence.

Scope of fossilization
Although Selinker and Lakshmanan (1993) clearly state that there is no precise list of fossilizable language structures, it is presently believed that, despite prominence being given to pronunciation, namely the so-called "foreign accents", fossilization is expected to occur at phonological, morphological as well as syntactic levels. While foreign accents and examples of bad pronunciation in general are -to a greater or lesser extentobservable among foreign language learners irrespective of their L1 background and language, fossilizable language structures at the level of morphology and syntax are more L1 specific, and their frequency of occurrence is likely to differ with respect to the native language of a given foreign language learner. As the paper focuses on grammar, syntactic manifestations of fossilization are given priority here, and are subject to a thorough consideration.
In trying to find the reasons for the high frequency of the above-enumerated difficulties, Wysocka (2007) claims that it is L1-L2 distance and disparities that give rise to language problems of that kind. For example, Chinese learners form interrogatives placing question words at the end of utterances, it being a Chinese rule of question formation. English or German speaking students manifest their L1 habits in the use of prepositions, pronouns or word order, due to ambiguities which their mother tongues allow in the case of the first two, and a more fixed nature of the third one in comparison to Polish. The situations in which the motherese is devoid of the category of case (e.g. Norwegian), tense or verb inflections (e.g. Chinese) translate into inaccuracies in all these language spheres. Problems with aspect are typical of Germans learning Polish and result from the lack of equivalents to the German pluperfect in Polish. As regards Japanese learners of Polish, they have problems with verb conjugation and plurality. Difficulties with preand suffixation are numerous in the case of English speakers of Polish and can be boiled down to a variety of means of word formation in Polish.
More recently, studies conducted by Krawczuk (2008), Dilna (2008) or Dąbrowska and Pasieka (2008)  Problems with government most often derive from L1 interferences and range from Germanic and Romanian to Slavic languages. To name a few examples, native speakers of English would say: *spędzamy mniej swojego czasu na, Czechs: *byłem z niej nie tylko rozczarowany and Ukrainians: *tolerancja do kogoś or *Mieszkam blisko od uniwersytetu on account of apparently close, though incorrect solutions the languages suggest (Krawczuk 2008). Problems with word and sentence relations, on the other hand, stem from inappropriate accommodation (Markiewicz-Pławecka 2008). This consists in wrong combinations of modifiers and words or phrases modified, resulting in such expressions as *Po świętach połowa narodu otrzyma trudności z trawieniem or *Brno jest drugie największe miasto. Surprisingly, it is Slavic learners of Polish, Bulgarians in particular, who experience such difficulties most frequently.

TL-induced syntactic fossilization
Language behaviours resulting from the reverse situation, notably, Polish playing a role of the TL, seem to be influenced by the same mechanisms, that is, morpho-syntactic interferences, and reflect the following areas vulnerable to fossilization (Wysocka 2009): cases, subject-verb agreement, inflection.
Problems with cases stem from fixed rules of the noun declension system in Polish and previously-mentioned non-existence and/or its different realization in the first language, as in English or Russian where the former has the genitive only whereas the latter has six (Wysocka 2007). The resultative forms include *Nie słuchaliśmy muzykę or *Oddaj to Adam (Korol 2008). Likewise, subject-verb agreement tends to be troublesome for foreign learners of Polish, including English speakers. The case of inflection, on the other hand, imposes on Korean speakers the linguistic behaviours they cannot translate from their mother tongue. As a result, they produce inaccurate utterances such as *Czas bardzo szybko minęła or *Zjadłam dużo czekoladów (Mielczarek and Lisowski 2008).

Other manifestations of fossilization
Other situations include occurrences during which the so called disfluencies occur in large numbers, are wide in scope and, hence, constitute language problems. Wysocka (2007) groups them as follows: pauses (filled and unfilled) prior to a potential grammar item, overuse of grammatically-based fixed expressions, overuse of English-based grammar.
The very categories are common to all non-native speakers of Polish as a foreign language, irrespective of their language background and the source language they operate on. Pauses, to start with, appear whenever learners encounter obstacles in expressing themselves grammatically. Their flow of speech is disrupted by pauses, repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases. Repetitions in the form of an overuse of certain routine formulas are observed whenever learners experience problems with finding a proper grammatical pattern. Finally, referring to English which, being a lingua franca, serves the role of a "walking stick", regardless of other languages acquired and/or learned, is reflected in over-reliance on certain grammatical points which learners consider to be universal and convenient in many situations.

Grammatical fossilization: the research proper
What grammatical (in)accuracies and (dis)fluencies responsible for and constituting grammatical fossilization reappear in speaking and writing has been the core objective of the study conducted among advanced users of Polish as a foreign language.

Subjects
The sample included 146 students of the Polish Language Course attending the School of Polish Language and Culture at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. 8 different nationalities and languages the sample represented allowed for presenting them under the label of 3 different branches of the Indo-European language family, namely Germanic, Slavic and Romance. The first group (A) comprised 13 German (G), 16 Scandinavian (S) and 13 English (E) students of Polish as a foreign language (46 altogether). The second (B) was composed of 24 Ukrainians (U) and 25 Slovaks (Sl.), which made 49 in total, whereas the third group (C) consisted of 14 Italian (I), 18 Spanish (Sp.) and 19 French (F) course participants, that is 51 as a whole. As far as gender and age are concerned, group A was made up of 17 female and 29 male students aged 21-45, group B contained 21 females and 28 males between 24 and 49 years of age, while in group C the number of female representatives amounted to 25 and the male ones to 26 between the ages of 20 and 31. In terms of qualifications, groups A and B seemed homogeneous and included similar proportions of BA and MA degree holders, i.e. 25 versus 21 and 25 versus 24 respondents respectively. Group C, being younger in general, contained 27 BA students, 17 MA students as well as 7 subjects with no diplomas. As far as their language experience is concerned, it was not limited to studying Polish since 100% of the German, English, Italian, Spanish and French respondents worked as lecturers and/or teachers of their na-tive languages in language schools in Poland; 9, 10, 4, 7 and 10 of them respectively having their BA in language and culture (teaching).

Tools
Text samples, which constituted the main source of the language material produced by the 146 respondents, were divided into oral and written assignments. In both cases, the tasks the subjects were confronted with covered a topic for discussion randomly chosen from a list of 100 quotations singled out for the purposes of the study. As regards oral assignments, they focused on students' oral performance and were designed to record samples of the language output produced by the informants in the course of speaking. More specifically, the respondents were required to comment on one of the statements drawn from the list of the quotations. Each time, the responses recorded were the students' 3-minute spontaneous reactions to the topic.
As regards the written tasks, each of the students was asked to pick a slip of paper containing a topic for discussion. Having selected one of the quotations at a time, they were requested to write on the issues, being given a 30-minute timelimit.

Results
As far as speaking is concerned, the students' performance violated rules of grammar mainly as a result of an unfortunate choice and usage of language within the scope of previouslymentioned grammar patterns, structures and orientations ranging from a dozen to several hundred examples of a given violation (see Table 1). What should be paid attention to, however, is the type of influences determining the form of behaviours in question. Here, the most invasive seemed English and German impact, especially when it comes to the use of wrong pronouns, relative pronouns included. Apart from that, the students' utterances reflected a number of disfluencies. These, by definition, are caused by pauses, all-purpose words, repetitions, reformulations, unfinished utterances, over-reliance on certain structures, redundant categories or meaningless expressions, and, depending on the language feature produced, can be either erroneous or nonerroneous. As the numbers prove, the Ukrainians were the least fluent among the participants in question, pausing, hesitating and repeating themselves almost ad infinitum. The English-speaking students followed the Ukrainians, over-relying on pauses and fixed language strings, slightly taking over the Slavs and Italians who occurred to be too repetitive and linguistically fixed, as well as they overused fixed expressions and frequently did not care to finish their sentences.
The students' writing samples, in comparison to speaking, were more diversified and broader in scope in terms of language areas misused and/or misfitted. All in all, it was grammar, lexis, spelling, punctuation and text-coherence that the subjects had problems with varying frequencies (see Table 2). The Ukrainian and Slovak students seemed to be the least fossilized, having the biggest problems with the subject-verb con-cord. The English-and Spanish-speaking subjects were the weakest, facing all types of grammatical problems. What was observed was the overuse of grammaticallybased fixed expressions making the written text incoherent. These ranged from several to almost one hundred occurrences. Irrespective of the observable frequency, though, the language produced was deprived of its factual quality most frequently in the case of the Italians or Spaniards who seemed to celebrate the very fact of speaking and writing as such, rather than conveying the message. The representatives of the remaining nationalities produced shorter text samples, so a smaller number of fixed expressions reappearing while writing may be the result of such a situation.

How to deal with grammatical problems?
In trying to avoid and/or overcome at least some of the abovelisted difficulties, one should not either understate or undermine the power and benefits of language practice, be it the classroom or homework. The examples of assignments presented below, catering for the subjects' problems listed above, differ from the tasks included in the study and traditional course-books as they are based on poetry. They are believed to not only broaden the perspective of problem coverage, but also language mastery, developing grammatical competence and reflection on language at the same time irrespective of the course or study attended. The poems in question have been written by the present author, and range from shorter forms designed for the recognition of certain patterns to longer ones, combining recognition with production and/or production itself involving structure development or reconstruction, to name a few.
The first task is a recognition type exercise asking the learners to underline all the pronouns to be found in the text. As the instruction says, the learners are to underline the pronoun included in the poem and, then, follow patterns of pronominal declension in Polish.
A productive task, on the other hand, can take on a short form and be based on e.g. answering questions (Task 3) or a longer piece of work to reflect on one's own utterances (Task 4). The former can be designed in the following way: TASK 3. Przeczytaj wiersz, wypisz wszystkie rzeczowniki w mianowniku, a następnie od każdego z nich utwórz formę odpowiadającą na niżej sformułowane pytania. Here, it is the case of nouns that the learners are confronted with. First, they are asked to write down all the nouns in the nominative case, and then proceed to answering a few questions, each reflecting a different case in Polish. A more demanding exercise, on the other hand, is threefold. It opens with a part devoted to all the adjectives presented in the text. What follows concerns the way the adjectives should be matched with the nouns given leaving the original forms unchanged. Finally, sentences are to be created on the basis of previously-formed adjective + noun combinations. TASK 4. Przeczytaj wiersz, wypisz przymiotniki znajdujące się w tekście, połącz je odpowiednio z podanymi niżej rzeczownikami nie zmieniając istniejących form i utwórz po jednym zdaniu z każdym utworzonym połączeniem (przymiotnik+rzeczownik).

Conclusions
The tasks proposed in this paper exemplify several ways of dealing with the most frequent grammatical problems (re)appearing both in oral and written communication. Those oriented on recognition are believed to help learners activate "old" stimuli (i.e. language rules and material previously learned) and, in general, perform better, especially when it comes to grammar patterns that are often troublesome. Time for reflection that such activities allow for seems to give learners a great opportunity for self-correction. Using recognition and production tasks is considered bridging the gap between fixed misconceptions and wrong realizations of grammatical rules. As a result, a text is wellthought-out and well created.
Finally, productive tasks are offered here to minimize learner's grammatical problems through construction of patterns as well as structures. No matter what type of exercise we choose, the real language of poetry always provides food for thought and reflection, and, thus, is expected to serve as a defossilizing force, raising students' linguistic awareness, be it in terms of language comprehension and production or both.