Page 62 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
process and teachers' work. I know from my own research, observation, and work with teachers that a gap exists between theoretical issues and educational practice. I naturally agree with the statement of K. Denk (2009, p. 47), who notes that a worrying phenomenon in contemporary education is the widening gap between theory and practice, and that in such a situation "it is essential to build a bridge between the theory and practice of education". General pedagogy as a science (Polish: pedagogika) and general didactics are practised as two separate disciplines, which doesn't exploit the significant potential of their mutual cognitive and practical usefulness (Palka, 2011, p. 23).
In Poland, the word didactics also carries some negative connotations, perhaps contributed to by a certain chaos in the contemporary discourse of didactics, which Klus-Stańska (2010) writes about. Didactics is also often identified with methods that are not worth much without theoretical foundations setting the direction. This may be due to historical inaccuracies of didactics in Poland, which cause us to give certain words specific meanings and use these terms interchangeably in different situations (Klus-Stańska, 2018, p. 25). I share the view of D. Gołębniak (2014, p. 151), who believes that educational practice (didactics) determined by the scientific concept of knowledge, behaviourist theories of development, and scholastic tradition of education, is stuck in the old school of thinking and acting. It is also difficult for me not to agree with B. Śliwerski (2009, p. 98) when he says that Polish didacticians do not notice the socialisation and educational shift into the virtual sphere and multicultural experiences. D. Klus-Stańska (2018, p. 13) also stresses the need to reconstruct didactics. She believes that didactics should return to a broad understanding of teaching and liberate the potential inherent in the use of educational philosophy, sociology of education, educational policy, pedagogical emancipatory currents, hermeneutics, symbolic interactionism, and gender pedagogy, among others.
The two passages above clearly indicate the need for a change in the understanding of didactics and subject didactics. B. Śliwerski (2017) points out that subject didactics should not only include the aims, methods, forms, techniques, and means of education, but also the history of the subject, its basic concepts whose meanings, theories, and models of education partially change, methods of scientific research, how to stimulate and organise teaching/learning processes, as well as various types of classes that can be conducted and the use of different media within them86.
Can language pedagogy (Polish: pedagogika językowa) as a hybrid sub-discipline of a science of pedagogy be a precursor of changes in the broadly understood language education, moving from an instrumental, methodical discipline to a broader research area concerning the relationship of a science of pedagogy (Polish: pedagogika) with other disciplines of scientific knowledge, including educational linguistics and sociolinguistics87? Could the field of language pedagogy initiate changes in thinking about language education and the design of different forms of education, and thus contribute to changes in education?
In my opinion, even if we raised the status of foreign language didactics to a separate science combining different disciplines and fields, we would still run the risk of directing our enquiries towards only methods of school practice (Polish: metodycznej praktyki szkolnej) and applied linguistics, because by speaking of foreign language didactics we mean teaching in order to achieve the highest possible
86 Ibid..
87 A branch of linguistics concerned with the study of the interaction of all aspects of social life with language use. It focuses on the sociocultural study of language acquisition.
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