Orthography Without Borders

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Orthography, the pillar of the uniformity in the written language, plays a special role in Hungarian culture. Its popularity is marked by the fact that competitions are organized throughout the Carpathian Basin at primary, secondary and higher education levels. In this presentation, we will highlight the values of the three-stage Simonyi orthographic competition, which involves primary schools. Besides nurturing talent and building professional relationships, our mission is to foster a love of the Hungarian language and promote the importance of Hungarian language culture. Tens of thousands of 5th-8th graders, i.e. 10-14-year-old students, from Hungary and ethnic Hungarian children from Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine have participated in this competition since it was first held 27 years ago. The competition has been online for four years. The digital platform was developed by a research group at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. The digital framework offers the opportunity to store the results in a database for each competition year. This growing corpus of student responses allows us to analyse the data from a special perspective, i.e. first language pedagogy. Also, we can explore changes in language use through a longitudinal analysis of the results. In our presentation, we focus on the differences between the results of students living in Slovakia, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine, and the results of participants living in Hungary. We examine which types of exercises pose the most problems for the schoolchildren and investigate the effects of a multilingual environment on the students' responses.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Tamás Csontos is a college senior lecturer at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. He has an MA in English language and literature. He obtained his PhD in English linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University in 2018. His fields of interest include English syntax, teaching English as a foreign language, teaching English for specific purposes (ESP), digital technologies/ICT tools, first language acquisition and bilingualism.

Etelka Tóth is a professor on the Faculty of Pedagogy of Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary.