Pluricentricity in foreign language teaching: The case of English and German in the Hungarian educational system (original) (raw)

Linguistic pluricentricity has been a widely researched area in sociolinguistics since the beginning of the 1990’s, when Clyne (1992) laid the theoretical foundations of the study of languages with multiple centers, i.e. countries in which they have some kind of an official status. Conceiving of a language as a pluricentric one will inevitably have an important impact on the way it is taught as a foreign language, which has also been discussed rather extensively by linguists and language educators (cf. for instance Muhr, 1996a or Jenkins, 2006). However, relatively little attention has been paid to the comparison of pluricentric languages in education, even though there are considerable differences between, say, the pluricentricity of English, German, Spanish, French, or Portuguese – just to mention a few of the most well-known examples – and these differences have important consequences in language teaching. This is the void that the present volume sets out to fill, investigating the role of English and German pluricentricity in the Hungarian education system. This book presents the findings of a complex research project which investigates the role of the pluricentricity of English and German in the Hungarian education system. More specifically, the legal–institutional framework (i.e. curricula and examination requirements) as well as textbooks are analysed with respect to the presence of pluricentricity in them, which is followed by an empirical study targeted at teachers’ and learners’ classroom interactions and beliefs, on the basis of a questionnaire survey with 484 learners and teachers of English and German as well as 37 interviews. Throughout the entire project, the following research question functions as the basis of the investigations: What role does the linguistic diversity of English and German play in language teaching in the Hungarian education system? To answer this question, the following three hypotheses are put to the test: (1) Pluricentricity plays a marginal role in the legal–institutional framework of language teaching in the Hungarian education system. (2) The marginal presence of pluricentricity in the legal–institutional framework results in teachers devoting relatively little attention to this aspect of language teaching in practice. Consequently, as learners are more open to differing standards than their teachers, this creates a discrepancy between learners' and teachers' beliefs. (3) A general predominance of dominant over non-dominant varieties can be observed. Hypothesis 1 is concerned with the legal–institutional framework, representing the macro-level of the investigation, which is targeted at systemic features that characterize the education system in its entirety. In contrast, Hypothesis 2 focuses on learners’ and teachers’ beliefs, pertaining to the micro-level of the study, complementing the aforementioned macro-level with more practical findings that concern the actual classroom interactions and experiences of teachers and learners alike. Finally, Hypothesis 3 is an overarching one, manifesting itself throughout each and every segment of the project, thus, it is dealt with in a recurring manner throughout the dissertation, with the ultimate conclusions being drawn at the end. Furthermore, an important methodological consideration must be mentioned here, namely, that, in order to achieve method triangulation, the present volume combines a quantitative perspective (comprising of the analysis of the legal–institutional framework and the questionnaire-based segment) with a qualitative one (which is basically the interview-based component of the project). The book finds that Hypotheses 1 and 3 are verified completely, indicating an unquestionable need to incorporate more pluricentric presence in the legal–institutional framework, as well as the predominance of dominant over non-dominant varieties throughout the entire project. However, the verification of the Hypothesis 2 is only partial, as the quantitative, questionnaire-based survey proves that learners do outperform teachers in terms of their openness to pluricentricity, but the first part of the hypothesis, which is about teachers in general not attributing enough attention to pluricentricity, is falsified by the qualitative, interview-based component, in which enough counterexamples are found to refute the absolute truth value of that statement. The findings of the present volume – namely, that pluricentricity still plays, in Hungary, a marginal role in English and German language education alike, especially at a systemic level, as far as the legal–institutional background, i.e. the curricula and the centralized examination requirements, as well as the widely used textbooks and other teaching tools are concerned, and somewhat less obviously so in the case of teachers’ and learners’ classroom interactions and beliefs – convey a relevant message to the entirety of the education system in Hungary, with all its levels and constituent parts, including primary, secondary and tertiary education, teacher training, curriculum and textbook development, as well as the day-to-day classroom practices of teachers and learners alike.