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The history of "language teaching" is shot through with methods and approaches to language learning - most recently with "communicative language teaching" - but this book demonstrates that a more differentiated and richer understanding of learning a foreign language is both necessary and desirable. Languages and cultures are interlinked and interdependent and their teaching and learning should be too. Learning another language is part of a complex process of learning and understanding other people's ways of life, ways of thinking and socio-economic experience
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In the last days of the post-Stalinist thaw in 1963 Poland, Jerzyk becomes involved with an assassination plot arranged by his father, uncle, and their friend Mr. Traba in an attempt to take back their lives.
In 1991 Mariusz Wilk, a Polish journalist long fascinated by the mysteries of the Russian soul, decided to take up residence in the Solovki islands, a lonely archipelago lost amid the far northern reaches of Russia's White Sea. For Wilk these islands represented the quintessence of Russia: a place of exile and a microcosm of the crumbling Soviet empire. On the one hand, they were a cradle of the Orthodox faith and home to an important monastery; on the other, it was here that the first experimental gulag was built after the 1917 revolution. Over the course of years Wilk came to know every single one of the islands' 1000 or so residents. From his remote home, from which he sent regular despatches to the Paris-based Polish newspaper Kultura, he attempted to observe and come to terms with the complexities and contradictions of Russian history, its glorious past and the cruelty of Soviet Communism. In the process, he has written a most unusual travel book, a beautifully descriptive work that belongs in the best tradition of writers such as Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Claudio Magris.
Pawel Huelle imagines the adventures of Hans Castorp from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
"At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is 'write a book about light.' The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific locale at different times of the year, in different kinds of weather, and with different human landscapes. Dukla, in fact, is a real place: a small resort town not far from where Stasiuk now lives. Taking an usual form--a short essay, a novella, and then a series of brief portraits of local people or event--this book, though bordering on the metaphysical, the mystical, even the supernatural, never loses sight of the particular time, and above all place, in which it is rooted"--Page 4 of cover.