Intercomprehension, transfer and L2 Polish

The present paper suggests that intercomprehension, one of the pillars of the so-called “plural approaches” commonly advocated for the development of pluri- and multilingualism, may play a particularly significant role in the Polish context. More specifically, it is argued that despite the traditional focus on receptive skills, this approach may nonetheless greatly favour the acquisition of L2 Polish in two potentially large groups of learners, i.e. speakers of Slavic languages as L1, on the one hand, and learners of other Slavic languages as L2, on the other hand. In both cases, learners could capitalise on their existing knowledge of Slavic languages closely related to the target language, thus devoting significantly fewer resources to the learning of those grammatical categories (e.g. nominal case, verbal aspect) that typically constitute notable obstacles for beginner learners, and focussing instead on the points in which the languages in contact diverge.