Multilingualism, Teaching, and Learning Foreign Languages in Present-Day Hungary

Hungarian minority languages are spoken in seven countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including Slovakia, Ukraine (Sub-Carpathian region), Romania (Transylvania), Serbia (Vojvodina), Croatia (Slavonia), Slovenia (Mura region) and Austria (Burgenland). In most of these countries and regions the Hungarian language counts a substantial number of speakers and all these countries and regions are neighbouring the kin-state Hungary. In the kin-state, the Hungarian language is the official language of the state. Due to twentieth century’s totalitarian and nationalist ideologies the Hungarian minority languages were discriminated. After the collapse of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the nineties of the past century the Hungarian minority languages have gained official status in the countries and/or regions they are spoken in. The concrete rights the Hungarian minority languages are granted however vary enormously, from ousting Hungarian from the official domains as in Slovakia to granting the Hungarian language a status as one of the official languages, such as in the Autonomous Province (AP) of Vojvodina. Despite these differences, we observe the resiliencing of the Hungarian minority languages in the so-called Carpathian Macroregion. In the heart of Europe, the Hungarian language functions in fact as a transnational regional vernacular language that has the potential of becoming a regional vehicular language. The resiliencing of the Hungarian minority languages in the Carpathian Macroregion also boosts multilingual and transnational communication. In this paper, it will be argued that this process is strongly supported by the Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe. The paper concludes with a general outlook on the position of minority languages in the post-Lisbon European Union.

Currently, European education systems, aware of need to know how to use languages, are developing bilingual and even multilingual programs, thus promoting research in the field of teaching and learning of foreign languages. In recent studies, the affectiveemotional aspects are emphasized, especially linguistic anxiety. The main objective of the present study is to measure the levels of linguistic anxiety of 519 students in Aragon (Spain) with the Spanish version of the FLCA scale (Perez and Martinez, 2001). From 1st to 4th of Secondary in the study of the French foreign language. According to the statistic the results show significant differences between boys and girls, depending on the gender, the teaching method of French (elective / bilingual) and the support, or not, in the study of the language.

Bilinguals demonstrate benefits in cognition (involving regulation of mental activity to resolve information) during processing. “Bilingual advance” is attributed to consistent management of two languages. Since bilinguals have a lifelong experience in controlling their two languages, they should have received more practice than monolinguals in processes engaging executive functions. In this study, an investigation was conducted on bilingual and monolingual students in Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, in 2018. 100 students were selected using purposive sampling method. It is assumed that balanced bilinguals; those who are equally proficient in two languages experience a host of cognitive advantages rather than monolinguals. In this study, it was attempted to investigate if advantage of bilingualism extends to social cognition and executive function (i.e. motivation, inhibitory control, and empathy). For this purpose, Executive Function Index and Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test were used in bilingual and monolingual individuals. Results showed that bilinguals possess better performance than monolinguals merely in social cognition (t (98) =-4.37, p < 0.05) and inhibitory control (F (1, 98) = 10.95, p < 0.05) but not in motivation and empathy.

The problems and state of teaching the Tatar language as one of the state languages of the Republic of Tatarstan in secondary and higher educational institutions are considered in the paper. The main objectives of teaching the Tatar language to various audiences are defined by the author. The special attention is paid to the issue of using new technologies, online school and other Internet resources. Conditions and effective ways of studying the Tatar language are described in the paper, the author attempts to define the reasons of low-productivity of teaching the Tatar language to speakers of other languages at the present stage. The author specified some ways of increasing the motivation for studying the Tatar language. The conclusion is drawn that one of the most effective methods of training the Tatar language as non-native is the communicative technology.

Text reuse is the act of borrowing text (either verbatim or paraphrased) from an earlier written text. It could occur within the same language (mono-lingual) or across languages (cross-lingual) where the reused text is in a different language than the original text. Text reuse and its related problem, plagiarism (the unacknowledged reuse of text), are becoming serious issues in many fields and research shows that paraphrased and especially the cross-lingual cases of reuse are much harder to detect. Moreover, the recent rise in readily available multi-lingual content on the Web and social media has increased the problem to an unprecedented scale. To develop, compare, and evaluate automatic methods for mono- and crosslingual text reuse and extrinsic (finding portion(s) of text that is reused from the original text) plagiarism detection, standard evaluation resources are of utmost importance. However, previous efforts on developing such resources have mostly focused on English and some other languages. On the other hand, the Urdu language, which is widely spoken and has a large digital footprint, lacks resources in terms of core language processing tools and corpora. With this consideration in mind, this PhD research focuses on developing standard evaluation corpora, methods, and supporting resources to automatically detect mono-lingual (Urdu) and cross-lingual (English-Urdu) cases of text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism This thesis contributes a mono-lingual (Urdu) text reuse corpus (COUNTER Corpus) that contains real cases of Urdu text reuse at document-level. Another contribution is the development of a mono-lingual (Urdu) extrinsic plagiarism corpus (UPPC Corpus) that contains simulated cases of Urdu paraphrase plagiarism. Evaluation results, by applying a wide range of state-of-the-art mono-lingual methods on both corpora, shows that it is easier to detect verbatim cases than paraphrased ones. Moreover, the performance of these methods decreases considerably on real cases of reuse. A couple of supporting resources are also created to assist methods used in the cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse detection. A large-scale multi-domain English-Urdu parallel corpus (EUPC-20) that contains parallel sentences is mined from the Web and several bi-lingual (English-Urdu) dictionaries are compiled using multiple approaches from different sources. Another major contribution of this study is the development of a large benchmark cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse corpus (TREU Corpus). It contains English to Urdu real cases of text reuse at the document-level. A diversified range of methods are applied on the TREU Corpus to evaluate its usefulness and to show how it can be utilised in the development of automatic methods for measuring cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse. A new cross-lingual method is also proposed that uses bilingual word embeddings to estimate the degree of overlap amongst text documents by computing the maximum weighted cosine similarity between word pairs. The overall low evaluation results indicate that it is a challenging task to detect crosslingual real cases of text reuse, especially when the language pairs have unrelated scripts, i.e., English-Urdu. However, an improvement in the result is observed using a combination of methods used in the experiments. The research work undertaken in this PhD thesis contributes corpora, methods, and supporting resources for the mono- and cross-lingual text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism for a significantly under-resourced Urdu and English-Urdu language pair. It highlights that paraphrased and cross-lingual cross-script real cases of text reuse are harder to detect and are still an open issue. Moreover, it emphasises the need to develop standard evaluation and supporting resources for under-resourced languages to facilitate research in these languages. The resources that have been developed and methods proposed could serve as a framework for future research in other languages and language pairs.

The purpose of this study is to explore how English language learners' (ELLs) consultation of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries could influence their second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition. Although research has empirically indicated that dictionary use could possibly affect learners' second language acquisition (SLA) in various ways, inconclusive results can still be found pertaining to ELLs' L2 vocabulary acquisition based on their dictionary use. In order to bridge this gap, sixty-four ELLs were recruited and divided into two groups for this experimental study. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the researcher examined how the consultation of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries could influence L2 lexical teaching and learning utilizing a 13,944-word lemmatized High Frequency Word List (HFWL) from the British National Corpus (BNC). The findings suggest that the consultation of monolingual dictionaries promoted students' L2 vocabulary acquisition, learning interest, confidence and positive attitude more effectively than that of bilingual dictionaries. Learners were also revealed to be cognizant of the salience of L2 exposure that monolingual dictionaries possess for reifying their L2 awareness and lexical development in an authentic fashion. Based on the outcomes yielded from this investigation, pedagogical and theoretical implications are discussed.

This thesis provides an assessment of language policy (Spolsky, 2004) in Alicante, one of three provinces in the Valencian Community in the south east of Spain. The Valencian Community was founded in 1982 during Spain’s transition to democracy. Its Statute of Autonomy (Corts Valencianes, 1982), which was created in the same year, declares Castilian (the language of the state) and Valencian (a geographic variety of Catalan) as co-official in the autonomous community. Prior to this, Franco’s regime (1939-1975) had prohibited the public use of regional varieties such as Valencian. Yet, whilst the two languages now share equal official status, there is disparity between official language statements and de facto language policy (Shohamy, 2006). This project contributes to the growing research areas of language policy and language revitalisation. The findings of this study are positioned in the context of Catalan-speaking territories, Spain, and the wider European setting. This thesis provides a localised view of language policy in Alicante and uncovers the complexity of the current sociolinguistic setting. In order to present such a nuanced view of local language policy, this project draws upon qualitative and quantitative data collected during the administration of fieldwork questionnaires in 2014 in the towns of Sant Vicent del Raspeig and La Vila Joiosa. Both towns are in the province of Alicante; Sant Vicent del Raspeig is in the comarca (county) of L’Alacanti whilst La Vila Joiosa is in La Marina Baixa. This thesis examines a number of themes that emerged from the data, including the evolution of the composition of linguistic repertoires and the perception and construction of Valencian identities. This project also discusses the closure of the Valencian public broadcaster Radio Televisio Valenciana (RTVV) and examines how external factors, in addition to internal components, contribute to language policy. Data revealed that there is not one clearly identifiable language policy in Alicante; rather multiple layers of language practices, language management and language beliefs operate and intersect at various levels to contribute to a complex local language policy. This complexity is due in part to the social, linguistic, cultural and historical change experienced since the transition to democracy. Of particular significance is the increased access to Valencian which has resulted from the introduction of language legislation and the inclusion of Valencian in the education system (Blas Arroyo, 2002). As such, more language users are able to acquire standard Valencian, and its surrounding ideologies (Milroy, 2001; 2007), and also literacy. Consequently, language policy continues to evolve to reflect such changes as more language users are exposed to Valencian. However, data suggest that previous conditions and consolidated ideologies inherited from the past also continue to be influential and contribute to current language policy. This range of language practices, management and beliefs informs a complex and dynamic language policy. This project presents the case of language policy in Alicante and contributes to current research in Hispanic Studies and Sociolinguistics. The findings of this study further our understanding of language policy and its development in response to changing sociolinguistic conditions, such as increased access to minority languages in the present European context as a result of language revitalisation efforts. The findings presented here should encourage further research and debate, not only in the context of Spain, but also in other European contexts where a minority language has undergone language revitalisation, which has resulted in a change to traditional sociolinguistic order.

The globalization of higher education has reshaped language use and practice on campus. As increasing numbers of international students change the campus into a more multilingual space, a variety of multilingual signs posted on bulletin boards and streets on campus become commonplace. Against such a backdrop of sociolinguistic changes on the globalizing campus in higher education, this study explores the ways in which multiple languages are chosen and used in South Korean higher education. Drawing on the framework of linguistic landscape, the present project analyzes multilingual signs displayed in public spaces of Konkuk University Glocal Campus, a local university that has pursued internationalization policies over the past decade. For this purpose, 208 public signs were collected from thirteen locations and analyzed in terms of language, producers, and communicative functions. The analysis reveals that a typical multilingual sign is in English and Korean and is created by the university authorities for referential functions. The most multilingual spaces are the library, a building for international education, and the dormitory, as these locations display various languages and language combinations. English is the most dominant foreign language in multilingual signage. Chinese and Vietnamese signs have begun to be increasingly present at KU, but their communicative functions are relatively limited. Based on such findings, implications for the university’s language and internationalization policies are also discussed.

In migrant communities, parents and children not only represent two diverse generations, but two different languages and cultures. As migrants who still carry memories of their homeland and culture close to their hearts, many are tied linguistically, culturally, and emotionally to their native country and culture. Language maintenance in migrant families assists parents and their children not only to communicate but to also understand cultural values better, which are crucial to their identity and worldview. Although research on community languages has flourished since Michael Clyne’s pioneering work on community language maintenance in the 1960s, there is limited understanding of the role of migrant families in maintaining and transmitting a community language and its influence on identity in Australia. Specific research on Rioplatense Spanish language maintenance and Argentinean identity within the Argentinean community has remained largely unexamined in the contemporary global landscape. In particular, we lack research on how and why first and second generation Argentineans maintain the Spanish language, but more specifically, Rioplatense Spanish and the consequences this has for their experience of Argentinean identity. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap for Australia and elsewhere by examining and discussing the following four themes. First, the central role of the family (as opposed to governments) in conceptualising and implementing language maintenance and identity practices. Second, the influence of familial (endogamous and exogamous unions, extended family, siblings, and language strategies) and extra-familial factors (social networks, travel, language status, and institutions) in augmenting the development and maintenance of community language literacy skills and identity. Third, how linguistic strategies and attitudes are dynamic and play a role in the process of language learning and maintenance, and last, the role and consumption of media (print, audio, audio-visual, and digital communication technologies), and technology in community language maintenance and identity. This thesis analyses the results of a two-step study, drawing upon data derived from mixed-methods research. First, a community-based survey of first and second generation Argentineans from Australia’s three largest cities — Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane — examined respondents’ use and maintenance of the Spanish language and the influence this has on their experience of Argentinean identity. Second, semi-structured interviews with first and second generation Argentineans were conducted to verify and triangulate survey findings and develop insights derived from the survey data. The analyses of the survey and interview data in this thesis provide insights into how the attitudes and actions of first generation Argentineans since the 1970s have influenced intergenerational ethnolinguistic vitality in Spanish language maintenance. This thesis illuminates our understanding by demonstrating how Argentineans in contemporary Australia maintain and transmit the Spanish language, their dialect Castellano Rioplatense [Rioplatense Spanish], and the implications this has for their experience of Argentinean identity. It also demonstrates that although the Argentinean community pertains to the broader Latin American community in Australia, they signal their uniqueness via their use of Rioplatense Spanish. The principal finding of this thesis is that despite Australia’s dominant monolingual landscape, first and second generation Argentineans continue to transmit and maintain Spanish, but more specifically, Rioplatense Spanish. Moreover, their use of Rioplatense Spanish allows them to maintain a distinct Argentinean identity in a multicultural context that otherwise publicly renders them as ‘Latin Americans.’ This thesis identifies four key elements in community language maintenance and identity. First, the family is the most salient factor in language maintenance and transmission. Second, the heterogeneity of the Argentinean community compared to other Latin American communities in Australia is reflected by their distinct use of Rioplatense Spanish, which maintains and ameliorates ethnolinguistic vitality, framing their Argentinean identity. Third, positive language attitudes within families further aids in the transference and maintenance of Rioplatense Spanish in various domains, at both micro and macro levels. Fourth, the consumption of media and digital communication technologies influences how the community language is used and experienced. This is achieved by individuals participating in diverse spaces that use and sustain not only the Spanish language, but more specifically, Rioplatense Spanish, and Argentinean identity. Hence, the use and maintenance of Spanish creates a sense of an imagined community, with individuals sensing that they mentally belong ‘here’ in Australia and ‘there’ in Argentina. The findings of this thesis have implications for promoting intergenerational language and identity within families, communities, pedagogical programming, educational and linguistic policies to facilitate language maintenance and identity opportunities.

This study focuses on primary foreign language teaching and learning. It seeks to reveal the perspectives and practice of three different stakeholders: specialist teachers, generalist teachers and head teachers. The study then places these beliefs and practice within a local, national and international context, considering the supporting factors for Primary Foreign Languages (PFL), as well as the challenges. It is a timely piece of research as it was conducted during the period when foreign language learning, for the first time in England, became statutory in primary schools. Furthermore, it took place during a timeframe of rapid change at all levels of education, which has had an effect on the translation of policy to practice. Data collection took place in two phases. In Phase One, an initial PFL practice mapping online questionnaire was sent to all schools in the Local Authority (LA) (n=69). Three schools agreed to participate. In Phase Two data collection methods employed in each of the three schools consisted of participant observations, semi-structured interviews, a self-reflective diary, informal conversation with staff and analysis of policy documents. The findings of the study show that all stakeholders in each school were supportive of PFL. However, this support did not translate into practice as the responsibility for PFL often rested solely with the specialist. As a result, the subject and specialists could be described as annexed, not fully integrated into the curriculum, and the specialists sought support from private companies instead of internally within the school. The majority of generalist teachers did not feel qualified to deliver the subject and there was a lack of future training options open to teachers wishing to train as PFL specialists. Those teachers who did express an interest in learning how to teach PFL felt that they could not engage fully with this endeavour due to internal and external pressure imposed upon them to achieve the highest possible pupil attainment in English and Maths. A disconnect was also revealed between the teachers’ most popular rationale for PFL teaching, which was preparing children to be ‘21st century global citizens’, and their actual practice. The teachers in the study recognised that, through learning a language and experiencing its culture, it may be possible to move from “egocentricity and ethnocentricity to a more altruistic sense of mutual benefit” (Byram, 2008:131). However, while espousing support for the teaching of intercultural understanding (ICU), the study reveals a lack of understanding in practice from stakeholders, policy writers and teachers. Overall, there is much goodwill for PFL as a subject, however, due to national and international drivers, it occupies a vulnerable place within the curriculum.

This paper looks into the challenges and prospects of implementing teaching of English to speakers of other languages(TESOL) approaches in Nigeria against the background of the Nigerian National Policy on Education (2004) which legitimise the teaching of English as a the official language. The review paper is a shift from the usual approach of examining the teaching of English as a Second Language(TESL) to teaching of English to Speakers of other Languages(TESOL).The two approaches recognize previous knowledge of English language but TESOL has a wider conceptual view. However, challenges of TESOL are highlighted in order to call the attention of stakeholders. The challenges of TESOL require urgent attention as previous studies have dwelt much on prospects which are interrelated with functions of English and importance of teaching English as a Second Language.

This dissertation tracks what I term the public dispensability of language: the apportioning of particular language varieties to contexts deemed public by their users, and the dialectical, productive potential for language forms to assemble and shape publics of varying durability and form. The work of linguistic representation, as phenomena described in this dissertation demonstrate acutely, produces not only the people involved as participants in communication, but also the groupings to which they belong, against which they mobilize, through which they live their relationships to the world. These representational processes are deeply internalized and reproduced at both the most unremarkably quotidian and unabashedly spectacular scales. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in literacy classrooms, Kurdish language classes, and wider community spaces in Turkey, I examine how language is used in public and how language is used to assemble publics, and explore the fraught politics of a would-be public Kurdish. I investigate how ways with text – reading, writing, brandishing, and circulating text objects – become indices of, and means to, the transformations of selves, and explore some of the consequences – personal, political, linguistic, moral – that ensue. Although the official ban on Kurdish (the largest minority language in Turkey) was lifted in 1991, the use of Kurdish in public life in Turkey remains restricted and politically fraught. Decades of violent confrontation between state security forces and Kurdish militants continue to frame “the Kurdish question” in Turkey, defining national debates over the future of democratic pluralism and national security. In recent years, the Kurdish political project has been increasingly pitched in terms of expanded linguistic rights, particularly for “mother tongue education.” Yet the majority of able speakers – women and older generations, who grew up in monolingual rural settings – are also the least likely to have had formal schooling or to have developed comprehensive literacy skills. A paradox thus unfolds: a newly emergent Kurdish language press produces texts (grammars, novels, newspapers, etc.) that few can read, since those who wield literacy are unlikely to know Kurdish, and those most likely to be proficient in Kurdish are unlikely to know how to read. How do expectations around language forms both presuppose and produce contexts as variously public, and with what stakes for negotiations of political and personal sovereignty? I examine how language ideologies and linguistic practices mediate the everyday productions of self- and group-making, and highlight the importance of understanding the political economy of language in Turkey – the politics around which language is deployed in what contexts, to what purposes, and with what histories of association. Key words: language politics; publics; literacy; Kurdish; Turkey

The aim of this study is to offer a reflection on categorization in a crosslinguistic perspective and to investigate possible strategies in comparing the Italian and Hungarian languages. In the light of recent research on how to handle cross-linguistic variation using adequate comparative concepts (Haspelmath 2007, 2018), the existing correlation between Italian and Hungarian object marking will be highlighted in order to show how the two linguistic systems, which at first sight appear to be incompatible, are nothing more than variations on the theme. The idea of this analysis originated with regards to the Vocabulary of Hungarian suffixes compared to their Italian counterparties, which is in preparation and challenges us with significant research questions concerning categorization.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract (Daza &amp;amp; Frank 2019):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We propose a Cross-lingual Encoder-Decoder model that simultaneously translates and generates sentences with Semantic Role Labeling annotations in a resource-poor target language. Unlike annotation projection techniques, our model does not need parallel data during inference time. Our approach can be applied in monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual settings and is able to produce dependency-based and span-based SRL annotations. We benchmark the labeling performance of our model in different monolingual and multilingual settings using well-known SRL datasets. We then train our model in a cross-lingual setting to generate new SRL labeled data. Finally, we measure the effectiveness of our method by using the generated data to augment the training basis for resource-poor languages and perform manual evaluation to show that it produces high-quality sentences and assigns accurate semantic role annotations. Our proposed architecture offers a flexible method for leveraging SRL data in multiple languages.&lt;/p&gt;

This paper examines the patterns of language use among immigrant children from Anglophone African countries living in Botswana. The study reveals major differences in their patterns of language use when compared to that of their parents. Three distinct language use patterns were identified; namely, children who are monolingual in English; those who are bilingual in English and the mother tongue, English and Kiswahili, or English and Setswana; and a third group who are multilingual in the mother tongue, English, Kiswahili and/ or Setswana. The study also reveals that whereas majority of the immigrant parents do not speak Setswana, in spite of their length of residence in Botswana, a good percentage of their children speaks Setswana. Another interesting finding is that many of the immigrant children who cannot speak their mother tongues are fluent speakers of Setswana, the dominant language of the host community. Data for this study were collected using two instruments; namely, a questionnaire designed for parents and an interview schedule for children aged between 18- 25. The questionnaire was administered to 100 immigrant parents from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. Fifty immigrant children from these countries were interviewed to get more insightful data on the patterns of language use among this population. Convenience sampling was used to identify the participants. The theoretical framework of this study was based on the “opportunity versus motivation” argument on language maintenance and language shift. The researcher recommends that immigrant children should be given more exposure and opportunities to learn and speak their mother tongue languages, especially in the family domain.