EN
The foreign language learner has to cope with a paradoxical situation: "he must learn the language by which he intends to communicate, he must communicate by means of the language he intends to learn" (W. Klein 1986: 146). The objective of the paper is to examine such problematic aspects of communicative behaviours in the foreign-language classroom and observe mutual correlation between different types of communicative strategies and the second language acquisition process, considered here as a social event constructed by both the learner and the teacher. It is in this perspective that the author investigates communicative ritual in the Polish foreign-language classroom.