Teaching of national languages in the V4 countries

Abstract

The monograph is a result of the common research of a team composed of four university workplaces in the V4 countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The original purpose of the V4 was to establish “forms of political, economic and cultural cooperation of these countries in the altered situation in Central Europe”1 as the Visegrad Declaration of 1991 states. Like many other aspects of life in the V4 countries, also schooling has been going through transformation, and L1 / mother tongue / national language2 teaching does not stand aside. As we will see later, it is not only didactics (or methodology in a narrower sense) of the subject that has been changing. There have been periods when mother tongue teaching was loaded with political ideology—clearly the period before 1989 was one of them; therefore the political changes that came after the collapse of the Iron Curtain influenced the content of mother tongue teaching greatly. Many teachers might not be aware of the political and social contexts of the educational systems they work in. But, in fact, they are a crucial part in them. The aim of this monograph (and the V4 project that the participating universities were working on) is to create a platform that would give the opportunity to see the profiles of the national educational systems and their specific contemporary conditions in countries that share common history and face very similar issues, giving special attention to the role of national languages and their teaching in the process of creating and maintaining cultural identity of the young generation in Central Europe. The Visegrad Group may prove to be a strong actor in creating the new humanistic ideas that would be able to compete with the Anglo-Saxon concepts, often imposed without reflection to Central European cultures and systems of education. The results of the research could be reached only through gathering the key resources (publications, documents, websites, etc.) and thorough analyses and discussions. In the process of exchanging and comparing the views of the research teams on the main topics of the project, we had to delimitate common methods of research. The important goal was not an easy one: the attempt to analyse and compare the materials, esp. the curricula, and the teaching practice in order to improve and correct the current models of teaching. Observations in schools therefore played a very important role in the research. The next step is the implementation of the conclusions of the analyses into teacher training—to generate new awareness of the problem among the future teachers of Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Slovak, and to design a model of mother tongue education linking the geopolitical conditions of our countries to the needs of global cooperation. Certain risks can be seen in this very ambitious project, because it will initiate a new direction of research and also many questions. It is worth noting that such studies are rather unique. This book represents a synthesis of the research and shows conclusions which have been gathered in the project. International continuation of the project Between 20th–21st October 2016 an international conference Didactics of national languages in Central Europe. Methodology and comparative studies was held at the Pedagogical University of Cracow. The aim of the conference was to compare the goals and ways of teaching national languages in Central Europe. It is worth emphasising that within the conference a session of the Commission for Didactics at The International Committee of Slavists was held. The conference was based on the key speeches of the four teams from Prague, Nitra, Budapest and Cracow. The presentations were the basis for extensive scientific work on the status of national languages in education of the V4 countries and Central Europe. Speakers even from outside the V4 participated: e.g. from Russia (Moscow) or Serbia (Belgrade). Thus, this project (initiated in the V4 states) could be of fundamental importance for further research on teaching national languages in Central Europe. The research papers from the conference will be published in the Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis. Studia ad Didacticam Litterarum Polonarum et Linguae Polonae in 2017.