Polish supplementary schools in Great Britain: a case study of the Polish School of Manchester

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the results of a small-scale pilot study of attitudes towards Polish and English conducted at a Polish supplementary school in Manchester, England. The intro-ductory part of the paper presents definitions of bilingualism and bilingual education as well as a variety of approaches and policies concerning bilingual education in the world. This is followed by some basic data on Polish immigrants living in the UK and Polish supplementary schools in the UK. The questionnaire used to elicit the data consists of two sets of questions: one concerns Polish and the other English. The questions and the answers elicited are discussed and compared, with the final concluding part focused on attitudes to Polish, which is the native language of the informants’ families.