Bilingual education in Szeged: a case study

This thesis examines how fashionable bilingual education can help some children to become Hungarian dominant bilinguals and what some bilingual teenagers think about the advantages of their bilingualism. Investigating a bilingual group at a secondary school, I will prove that although children can learn two languages parallelly, in this case education alone cannot establish balanced bilingualism in students as their mother tongue gets a stable and firm position. Using a continuous association test, a questionnaire in which students evaluate their own language skills and a word-translation test, I will demonstrate that the investigated group is a Hungarian dominant one if we regard only the vocabulary. Summarizing the results of the questionnaire in which students expound their views about the advantages of acquiring more languages, I will show that these teenagers see the values of bilingualism mainly in utilitirian purposes.