The article presents the results of a survey on the linguistic awareness of participants of state certificate examinations in Polish as a foreign language. The survey was taken by those foreigners who passed the certificate examinations at the University of Wrocław in May 2018 (B1, B2 and C1 levels). The analysis of the survey material shows that the language awareness of the participants of the certificate exams is complex, and its functioning can be described in two basic aspects — competence and convictional. The competence aspect includes linguistic awareness based on recognising the need to know the components of the Polish language system and the resulting communicative effectiveness of utterances. The convictional aspect, on the other hand, relates to consciousness in sociolinguistic terms (the impact of the certificate on social relations) and consciousness in anthropological and cultural terms (revealed in comments on the knowledge of Polish language as a desired value).