British and American Cultural Stories in Hungary

Abstract

This paper presents a complex study highlighting English and American cultural stories and makes an attempt at determining to what extent these cultural stories are known among students of English and Translation Studies in Hungary. The first stage of the research was a process of finding out about previous research and then selecting British and American cultural items that might be relevant for Hungarian students. These are presented as a list in the introduction. Nine instances have been singled out for further analysis in this paper, in the second section of which the background of the cultural stories is described in detail. The third section offers information about a survey conducted among a group of students of English and Translation Studies, underlining the need for intercultural education in both courses. The first empirical results of a pilot survey were presented during a HUSSE conference in Veszprém (14th Biennial HUSSE Conference, University of Pannonia, Veszprém, 31 January – 2 February 2019), the title of the forthcoming paper is “I can drink with any tinker in his own language” – Target Language Culture in EFL at Different Levels of Teaching. More information including students’ personal insights can be found on the beliefs and perceptions of students of English about language and culture in a previous paper (Szele 2019).