Raising awareness of cognate vocabulary as a strategy in teaching English to Polish adults

Polish and English, like most European languages, share numerous cognate words and expressions which can be easily understood even by those Poles who do not speak English. A seemingly obvious classroom implication of this fact is that these vocabulary items should be used in teaching English to Poles. When presented with cognate words, even a beginner's vocabulary should surge within a relatively short time. However, as preliminary research on beginners shows, access to this lexicon is easy only in the case of learners who are trained to notice and use cognate vocabulary. The training involves raising the learners’ lexical awareness. This article reports on several pieces of research concerned with examining and raising language awareness of cognate vocabulary, which were carried out on beginning and advanced Polish learners of English. Particularly, it focuses on an experimental study meant to check how awareness raising tasks change advanced students’ vocabulary learning strategies, and whether they could trigger positive transfer from Polish in receptive and productive vocabulary tasks in English. Finally, it presents implications for further research and classroom use of cognate vocabulary.