Działania mediacyjne w uczeniu się i nauczaniu języków obcych od teorii do praktyki

Abstract

MEDIATION ACTIVITIES IN LEARNING AND TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE Mediation is present in various areas of social life, and the meaning of this concept depends on the field in which it is applied. Generally, it is defined as a process aimed at maintaining social ties, mitigating disputes, and resolving conflicts. Its primary function is therefore to establish and maintain communication. The concept of mediation officially entered the area of language education with the publication of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages by the Council of Europe in 2001. In this document, all linguistic activities are divided into four categories: reception, production, interaction and mediation. However, the latter one was treated marginally – it was reduced almost exclusively to the translation of texts, and no descriptors regarding this category have been developed. Due to the fact that in contemporary multilingual and multicultural societies mediation has begun to attract more and more interest, work began on a new project of the language description system, i.e. a volume supplementing and extending the content of the first version of the document from 2001. It was released in 2020 and it is entitled CEFR – Companion volume. In this volume, mediation is presented in a very extensive way. It presents three types of mediation activities: mediation of texts, concepts and communication, and the newly created descriptors are listed in 19 tables and additional five tables include mediation strategies. There may be be intra- or interlinguistic mediation, and all text mediation descriptors require the combined use of reception and production activities. In the process of learning and teaching foreign languages, the main goal of mediation is to facilitate, establish and maintain linguistic communication. The popularity of mediation goes hand in hand with the need for mediators, both linguistic and (inter) cultural. Educating competent mediators has become one of the priorities of language education. To meet this challenge, mediation had to find its rightful place in curricula, modern textbooks, certification tests, etc. In teaching practice, an effective method of developing mediation competence is teaching based on performing mediation tasks, mainly comprehensive ones, requiring the cooperation of team members, because it is only such tasks that create conditions enabling the use of the types of mediation proposed in CEFR-CV by the Council of Europe.