Abstract
The article reports the findings of a retrospective study which looked at Hungarian learners’ attitudes towards Russian people, the Russian language and teachers of Russian. Mixed-methods sequential explanatory design (Ivankova, Creswell, & Stick, 2006) was applied which combines the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data in two consecutive phases. First person accounts turned out to be a useful and relevant resource for exploring individual differences in proficiency in Russian. Differences in attitudes appear to play a role in the developmental process, but to what extent this refers to attrition or non-acquisition is unclear.
Highlights
The current literature (Szilágyiné, 2006; see Dörnyei, Csizér, & Németh, 2006) suggests that Russian lessons were not effective in Hungarian schools, where it was taught as an obligatory subject from 1945 to 1988, mainly due to attitudinal factors towards the occupants
The period of occupation can be divided into three phases (Szilágyiné, 2006), and during the final phase, the students were probably less affected by the negative attitudes towards the Russian language and people
This study examines the attitude of the learners in the final phase by means of a motivational survey and in-depth interviews
Summary
The current literature (Szilágyiné, 2006; see Dörnyei, Csizér, & Németh, 2006) suggests that Russian lessons were not effective in Hungarian schools, where it was taught as an obligatory subject from 1945 to 1988, mainly due to attitudinal factors towards the occupants. The period of occupation can be divided into three phases (Szilágyiné, 2006), and during the final phase, the students were probably less affected by the negative attitudes towards the Russian language and people. Russian language proficiency was ascertained by means of a lexical test (recognition and recall) tapping the number of words the participants knew from a set of words in Russian. The assumption was that many factors play a role in the lexical development (i.e., acquisition and attrition) of words. By means of a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design (Ivankova, Creswell, & Stick, 2006), the study explored the extent to which a negative attitude towards the speakers of the language may have played a role in the recall of Russian words in Russian as a foreign language. The main goals of this study were to measure the impact of attitude(s) on proficiency in Russian and to identify different factors contributing to low or high language retention by analysing first person accounts
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