4. 2014.

Abstracts in English

Studies

Nádor, Orsolya

The memory of András Vályi

András Vályi is a particular personality of the 18th century Hungarian cultural history. As a result of the language policy processes in those days, he was offered an opportunity like no one else since then: he could stand as a professor of Hungarian in front of his students and he could outline the bases of Hungarian language and point out the interesting features of the linguistic system. His work was characterized by commitment, consistency, and conscious didactic construction. It is important both for first-language pedagogy and also for teaching Hungarian as a foreign language and as an environmental language to outline his work from time to time even today. Recently, Zoltán Éder has introduced Vályi’s life and published work in details. Now on his 250th birth anniversary, the present study commemorates him by introducing the language political-language planning environment that was inherent in the slow expansion of Hungarian language in higher education.

Sáfrány-Molnár, Ilona Mónika

Measuring competencies from a gender perspective

Each year the Office of Education (Oktatási Hivatal) organizes a national survey on text comprehension, text production competencies and mathematical literacy. The study analyses the results of a competency survey for text comprehension and text production, broken down by gender. This survey was carried out in 10th grade in educational institutions maintained by the capital in 2010 and 2011. The analysis discusses the distinguishing features of text types and cognitive operations and the differences between education forms (school types) and competency levels. Measures of these two years clearly show that there is a significant difference between the performance of boys and girls. The most characteristic difference in performance can be found in exercises for text comprehension and production. In the competency surveys, apart from a few exceptions, girls answered all questions nearly at the same level as boys or better than them with a high percentage difference.

Kránicz, Rita

The comparative analysis of the interactions in hospital classes and traditional classes

The aim of the present study is to explore the characteristics of classes taking place in hospitals. The analysis compares this special communication scene with everyday conversation and also with the interaction pattern of traditional classes. The methods of the analysis are quantitative on the one hand as it builds on the tradition of conversation analysis; and on the other hand, qualitative examples provide an insight into the particular atmosphere of hospital classes. This research aimed to answer the question to what extent can features of an institutional interaction, in this case traditional classes, be discovered and how much they differ.

Workshop

Sipos, Mária

Interesting facts about language and languages on the INNET project website

Supplementary online materials for teaching grammar

This study presents a website that helps introduce the notions of linguistic vulnerability, linguistic minority, and linguistic diversity into public education and public opinion. On the website of the Polish-Hungarian-Dutch-German project, visitors can find, inter alia, twelve popular scientific chapters, learning materials (exercises with key) prepared for five subjects, information and photos on an interactive map. The materials on the website are applicable in class work and also for individual orientation, and there are possibilities for further applications as well (e.g. additional classes, study groups, professional days, class trips etc.). The study shows an example of compiling a quiz game the items of which when are collected from the first two popular scientific texts.

Mászlai-Nagy, Judit

Possibilities and conclusions of speech comprehension development among fifth-grade students

Today due to the expansion of visual media, the competence of focusing on listening develops insufficiently in the case of primary school pupils. The development of text comprehension competence, however, plays a key role in educational practice, as the development of this subfield has an effect on the development of other competences and it is an indispensable condition of teaching and learning. This study aims to provide a starting point to the practice of developing speech comprehension by outlining Mechthild Hagen’s speech comprehension model and Margarete Imhof’s speech comprehension competence model. Then it introduces a complementary learning material helping the development of listening comprehension. Finally, it compares the speech comprehension performance of the participating project group and of the control group learning in normal curriculum, before and after development. The findings confirm the need for the targeted development of speech comprehension.