“What do Hungarians eat?” The methodology of reading aloud as a tool for improving pronunciation in teaching Hungarian as a foreign language

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the extent to which the methodology (or methodologies) of reading aloud used in
Hungarian mother-tongue education can be applied to the teaching of Hungarian as a foreign language (HFL), as
well as the insights from HFL instruction that may be productively transferred to mother-tongue education.
In mother-tongue education, reading aloud constitutes an important subdomain of reading development.
Within the Hungarian education system, systematic instruction in reading aloud is provided from the first grade
onwards, and a well-established methodological tradition has developed in this area. In the context of Hungarian as
a foreign language, by contrast, the development of reading-aloud competence does not necessarily take place in childhood and typically builds on procedural knowledge and skills already acquired in learners’ first language.
When reading in a foreign language, learners must acquire the pronunciation rules of the target language, while
vocabulary knowledge and the ability to recognize word meanings are also essential. In HFL instruction, moreover,
reading aloud does not usually appear as an independent area of competence development; rather, it is typically
treated as a subcomponent of pronunciation teaching. It is therefore worth examining how the two methodological
traditions can inform and enrich one another.
In the study, I present initial findings from an ongoing data collection project. In April 2023, a large-scale project was conducted in cooperation between the PTE ISC and the KorSzak Corpus Linguistics and Subject Methodology Research Group. As part of this project, we compiled the Spoken Learner Subcorpus of the KorSzak Learner Corpus, which contains Hungarian-language oral productions—both read-aloud texts and spontaneous speech—produced by students enrolled in Hungarian as a foreign language courses at the PTE ISC. Drawing on phonetic and phonological analyses of the read-aloud texts in the corpus, conducted using Praat, I formulate methodological implications for the teaching of reading aloud and pronunciation in HFL instruction.