Hungarian Language Teaching in Asymmetric Language Context: A Case of Constrained Teacher Agency

Abstract

ABSTRACT There is a sizable Hungarian minority living in Romania, who have the right to learn in their mother-tongue. While most Hungarians are enrolled in Hungarian medium education, there is a small number of families who opt for mainstream Romanian monolingual schools. According to the Law, the latter group can choose to learn Hungarian in an optional manner, but there is no usable curriculum for this kind of education. Given the absence of top-down regulation, without centralized pressure on choosing how to teach, teachers could become real classroom decision-makers; nevertheless, they fail to do so. More exactly, as they emphasize solely the symbolic values of the minority language, they unintendedly reinforce the asymmetry between the majority Romanian and minority Hungarian languages, implicitly legitimizing the dominant languages ideology promoted by the more powerful institutional actors and the policy environment itself.