Phraseological units in the teaching of Hungarian

Abstract

This paper argues that broadly understood phraseological units have a place in language learning from the very
beginning. After an introduction to the concept of phraseological units (or phrasemes) and the so-called phraseological spectrum, I examine various teaching aids and assessment frameworks for their expectations, aims and procedures in relation to phraseological units. Coursebooks, exercise books and grammar manuals include a large number of phrasemes, in line with the external regulators: at the more basic levels, they mainly teach communicative formulas, collocations, and function-verb relations, while more idiomatic proverbs and sayings only come into their own after level B2. The teaching of phrasemes is mainly linked to the teaching of lexis and is carried out using the procedures common in that field (grammar works use phraseological units to illustrate grammatical phenomena). At the end of the study, I propose additional procedures for the teaching of various types of phrasemes (at the level of perception, attention, memorization, visualization, and recall). (This paper is part of my research for my doctoral thesis. In my research, I investigate the use of phrasemes in the written language of B2 and C1 Hungarian learners. I am interested to find out whether and, if so, which phraseological units are used, to
what extent and how they are used by these language learners in their written texts, and I would also like to know
if there is a difference or what the differences are between the phraseological units used by speakers at the two
levels of proficiency. To answer these questions, I use texts written in the Origo language exam at the B2 and the
C1 level.)