Abstract
The study discusses the application of a data-driven learning (DDL) method to teaching Polish as foreign language. DDL is a relatively new approach to teaching, popularised by Tim Johns in the early 1990s.
Since that time this method has expanded to other countries. In Poland is not as widespread, though, and it is mostly used in academic sphere in teaching English.
The presented study aims at the description of DDL in teaching Polish as foreign language on the example of alternations of phones ó : o in nouns (cf. samochód 'car' : samochodu '[without] car'). The discussed alternation makes it difficult for foreign students to derive a correct form of oblique cases in which the ó into o exchange takes place.
The common reason for the appearance of errors is an ignorance of the alternation or difficulty identifying it. Some students are not able to determine in which lexemes the exchange occurs as there are also nouns where the alternation does not take place (ex. ból 'pain', podróż 'travel', szczegół 'detail').
The author analyses the data from a manually annotated one-million-word subcorpus of the National Corpus of Polish. Based on the three last phones of lexemes with the alternation ó : o, he classifies all examined nouns into 22 categories.
Furthermore, he proposes three concrete classroom exercises, completely prepared based on corpus data. The research builds on/highlights the procedure of DDL which consists of three steps: identification, classification, and generalisation.
What is more, the present approach has a potential to enrich classroom activities and has a favourable impact on the development of language teaching methods.