Intercultural problems in teaching forms of address to Polish learners of English as a second language

Polish immigrants, who otherwise seem to have a fairly good command of English, often sound excessively formal or shy on the one hand, and too direct, sometimes even rude, on the other. The paper presents a comparative analysis of English and Polish forms of addressing people and the sociocultural rules of their use. It is pointed out that numerous similarities in the repertoires of English and Polish forms of address lead Polish ESL learners to assume wrongly that the similarities extend also to the sociocultural rules of use. It is argued that systematic training in the area of differences between the cultural aspects of linguistic behaviour between immigrants’ mother tongue and English should be an integral part of all ESL courses.