A határon túliak államnyelvoktatásáról
The present study examines the main features of developing lower level Slovak language competencies for minorities in Slovakia, analysing the factors that affect the teaching process of reading and writing in Slovakian. An analysis of the national school curriculum of the teaching of the Slovak Language and Slovak Literature as a school subject is also provided in order to get an insight into the acquisition of reading and writing in Slovakian. The curricula and the textbooks are analysed from the educational methodological perspective. The study points to the problems that arise from the lack of theoretical substantiation for teaching of as well as for acquiring writing and reading competencies in Slovak as a second language.
education, Hungarian minority in Slovakia, reading and writing, Slovak language teaching
Learning to read and write in Transcarpathian schools with Hungarian language of instruction The present paper aims to examine the first stage of teaching writing and reading skills in schools of Transcarpathia (Ukraine) with Hungarian language of instruction. The study gives an overview of the process how the writing and reading skills of three languages (Hungarian as the first language, Ukrainian as the second language and English as a foreign language) are developed at elementary schools as well as it focuses on the possible connections between the mother tongue, second and foreign languages. During the research the curricula and the textbooks were analysed and the regulations of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine were also checked. The interchange of the top-down regulations and the classroom practice is risky, but if both fields are analysed together and not separately the content, the development of the linguistic behaviour and the input pattern, as well as their main principles can be achieved better. Public education in Ukraine has been constantly changing since the country became independent (1991). Regular change (and a series of protracted political and economic crisis) unfortunately has a negative impact on education as a whole, including teaching reading and writing skills.
foreign language, Law on Education, mother tongue, second language, teaching to read and write, Transcarpathia, Ukraine
The aim of the present study is to show the first cycle of teaching writing and reading skills in schools where the teaching language is Hungarian. The focus was on the formation of Romanian writing and reading skills and its characteristics, in order to get an insight on how the mother tongue The aim of the present study is to show the first cycle of teaching writing and reading skills in schools where the teaching language is Hungarian. The focus was on the formation of Romanian writing and reading skills and its characteristics, in order to get an insight on how the mother tongue
foreign language, mother tongue, second language, teaching to read and write
In Hungarian medium schools in Slovakia, the teaching of the Slovak language is compulsory from Grade 1 of the first stage of primary schools. This paper discusses the implementation and results of a currently ongoing project in Slovakia for the renewal of state language education, more precisely the principles and methods observed by us in the first stage (6–10-year-olds). It presents the practical realization of as well as the activities applied during the project. Based on all these, it seems that the Hungarians in Slovakia deprived themselves of a significant opportunity in the field of state language education when the project described was launched almost unprepared.
second language acquisition, language education, state language education, language learning
The paper discusses the language pedagogy situation and its significant difficulties of Hungarian minority pupils. Drawbacks come from the central state education offices that force state language acquisition as foreign language learning or treat minority pupils fluent in the state language, and also from the old-fashioned methods of regular Hungarian language pedagogy. A better solution may be derived from authentic sources of cognitive psychology, usage-based second language acquisition and usage-based cognitive linguistics. L2 (the majority state language), and also its reading and writing should be learned at lower grades with the help of the already present L2 experiences, supported by the linguistic experiences of the vernacular (mostly a Hungarian dialect), with comparisons of the speech sounds, the word meanings (polysemous networks), clause constructions of the two languages, including e.g. the construal modes of motion, object manipulation, perception, or person identification, tense. Such a functional language pedagogy would develop phonological awareness, word identification skills, vocabulary skills, and also working memory skills, which is not the real practice today. A complex investigation project is proposed, too, in order to get a thorough picture of the cognitive and sociocultural circumstances of the Hungarian minorities related to L2 learning.
usage-based functional linguistics, Hungarian minorities, L2 acquisition, language pedagogy, learning to read, learning to write
Nyelv és stílus
The literary achievement of Zoltán Tárnok, seven volumes of which have been published so far, has not received proper response. He belongs to the realist strand of twentieth-century Hungarian literature, his writer’s world is the 8th district of Budapest. His works (short stories, short novels) focus on the marginalised common man (the lower level of proletariat). A recurring motif is shadow, having metonymic, metaphoric and symbolic significance. In addition to detailed descriptions of physical objects, his style is characterised by sensitive psychology, the representation of the world of a “split personality” in several cases, and writer’s imagination that sometimes verges on mysticism and fantasticism. His elaborated language use is characterised by raising suburban slang items to a literary level, dramatic squabbles, and verbal irony and humour. His storytelling is colourful: along with the writer-narrator, the hero of the “life story” (lifelong prevarication) is often speaking. Most short stories place their plots in a timeless framework, creating a cosmic perspective.
Zoltán Tárnok, literary topography, 8th district, slang, objectivity, mysticism, motif of shadow
The study aims at elaborating a method for metaphor identification in Hungarian. The vantage point of the endeavour is the so called MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Process Vrije Universiteit, University of Amsterdam). It was developed for metaphor annotation in English and Dutch, being based on corpus-based dictionaries. Consequently, the main challenge – beside the missing corpus-based concise dictionary of Hungarian – was to adopt the original methodology for an agglutinative language, as well as to make it morpheme-based instead of word-based. Moreover, we have made additional changes in the process in order to specify not only the structure of a metaphorical expression, but also the semantic relations in it. The adapted method has been tested and evaluated in the course of annotating a small-scale research corpus. The paper details some of the problematic cases as well.
metaphor, identification, semantic relations, annotation
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
The paper’s intention is to show how the above mentioned three lexemes have recently changed their parts of speech and how they have become postpositions out of suffixed adjectives. For this reason, the paper pays special attention to the process of grammaticalization and shows how these words gained a grammatical meaning with the effacement of their lexical meaning. The study describes those units as constructions and investigates the realignments of the initial constructional schemas. To prove the fact of conversion, the paper uses both corpus-linguistic and semantic analyses.
grammaticalization, postpositions, constructions, conversion
Szemle