The impact of social and cultural capital on the success of language exams

Abstract

AbstractThe problem of not having a language exam by the end of the university years affects thousands of students in Hungary. The literature reveals that this area is less researched, but there are a number of factors that I found important to examine. I did my research in the East Hungarian region. The reason for this is that many studies in this area have a higher rate of unsuccessful language learners than the rest of the country. I used online survey method in the form of a questionnaire, which consisted mostly of closed questions (alternative, selective and scale). My questions were focused on topics such as socioeconomic status, school life, language biography, cultural capital, language-specific social capital, language-learning type, affective characteristics, language pedagogy, drop-out and language learning attitudes. In this present study I highlight the effect of social and cultural effect on the success of language learning. During the query I used snowball method and address list query. As finding the target people proved to be very difficult, the number of elements is not significant (N = 202).