Bilingual attitudes of philology students in a multilingual environment

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to investigate the attitudes of philology students towards bilingualism in a multilingual environment. The research was conducted among students majoring in Hungarian, English, Ukrainian, and German language and literature at the Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian College of Higher Education in Transcarpathia, Ukraine. Data were collected with the help of an online attitude survey (N=185) and three focus group interviews (N=12). Based on the results, philology students have generally positive attitudes towards bilingual language use, code-switching and lexical borrowing. They consider language learning as extremely important nowadays, especially English if someone wants to live or work abroad, while Hungarian–Ukrainian bilingualism is most useful in Transcarpathia. The main problem is that the Ukrainian state language is taught as a first language to ethnic minorities instead of being taught as a foreign language like English. As a result, many Hungarian children cannot speak Ukrainian. Furthermore, most students are not aware of the importance of additive language teaching, which considers the native dialect of learners to be as precious as the standard language variant. Therefore, it would be advisable to introduce the additive approach into the curriculum of all prospective teachers in multilingual environments.