The objective of this paper is to acquaintance the readers with works of Aleksander Szulc, an eminent Polish linguist and researcher in glottodidactics, devoted to the topic of learning and teaching vocabulary during courses of German as a foreign language. Special attention has been paid to the notions of conventional syntagm and situation idiom introduced by Szulc. The fi rst part of the paper focuses on the former notion, which partially corresponds to the notion of collocation. We present the role of conventional syntagms in learning and teaching foreign vocabulary and the impact they have on the process of interference. We also argue for the presence of conventional syntagms in vocabulary building activities in classroom and in course books. Further we show the evolution of Szulc’s defi nition and understanding of the notion of conventional syntagm and how he progressed from this notion to the notion of collocation. The second part of the paper focuses on situation idioms which correspond to the modern notion of pragmatic fi xed phrases. After their short presentation, we argue for their signifi cance in learning German as a foreign language and hence, for the necessity of their incorporation in teaching of German. Finally, the article is also an attempt at reintroducing Szulc’s insights into academic discourse and an appeal to recognize his contribution to the research on collocationality.

German academic language contains far more phrasemes than it used to be assumed. Apart from specialist expressions, there are many collocations, idioms and pragmatic phrasemes, which perform a number of textual functions. Scientific discourse has received an increased interest lately, however, no study of body-part phrasemes in academic language has been conducted. This paper presents an analysis of occurrence of phrasemes with the component “eye” in a specially created corpus of German academic texts in such branches as: linguistics, literary studies, foreign language teaching, and medicine. The paper approaches the following questions: Are such phrasemes used in scientifi c discourse and, if so, in which branches of science? What are the purposes of their use? Which phrasemes are favoured in all the analysed branches?

The present article is concerned with word formation and word formation exercises. In its theoretical part the article shows the role of word formation in foreign language teaching and learning as well as the state of the art in the research on word formation as a teaching resource. The article further presents the results of an empirical research into the evaluation of word formation practice exercises by learners of German as a foreign language.