Investigating the acquisition of L2 Polish by East Slavic Speakers: theoretical and methodological aspects

The present paper describes the rationale and theoretical framework of a large-scale re- search project aimed at documenting the acquisition of L2 Polish by speakers of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. This group of learners is particularly noteworthy for two main reasons. First, because of recent socio-economic trends, it has become the largest group of L2 Polish learners. Second, East Slavic languages are lexically and grammatically very similar to the target language, which creates a favourable context for intercomprehension. While the special characteristics of these learners are acknowledged by theoreticians of Polish language teaching, there is a shortage of empirical data on the actual impact of their L1 on the acquisition process. The paper first outlines the theoretical background of a research project designed to fill this gap, with a particular focus on the language teaching applications of intercomprehension. The methodology of the study is then described in detail, followed by the presentation of a few preliminary results.