During everyday conversations, young children are often challenged with the task of correctly identifying the referent of novel words. What is their primary aim when they try to do so? We propose that by being motivated to successfully participate in communicative interactions, children primarily aim at comprehending what the speaker intends to…

Performing a stay in a country where the L2 is the official language can provide the perfect immersion for L2 development (traditional study abroad). In the case of English learners, internationalization and the role of English as a lingua franca make it unnecessary to perform the stay in an English-speaking country. Hence, an increasing number of…

Preparing English as a foreign language (EFL) students for final exams and language exams has become more and more significant in secondary education. However, those students who continue their studies as English majors have to live up to new expectations and rise to different challenges such as reading and discussing literary texts written in…

The aims of the study are to construct an online instrument to assess different aspects of morphological awareness and to examine its development and its relation to reading comprehension in grades 2-4 in Hungarian children. Altogether, 4134 students were tested. The online test evaluated inflectional, derivational, and compound morphological…

This study aims to assess the views of Hungarian professors/associate professors regarding important student factors at the beginning of their scientific and academic careers. Two hundred seventy-three university faculty members who work with high-achieving students (e.g., gifted, honors) completed a questionnaire regarding the attributes of…

Reading strategy use among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) is one of the most important areas of foreign language (FL) strategy research. Students who actively use their reading comprehension strategies can understand and recall more information from what they read and acquire higher-level language proficiency. The focus of our…

Introduction: Examining the connection between vocational training and the world of work, nowadays it is essential to mention the "gap", which keeps on growing, between training and the economy due to the quick technological changes. Purpose: The purpose of the research is scientific investigation of the demand process of competency…

PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is the fourth assessment in the current trend series, following PIRLS 2001, 2006, and 2011. There were 61 participants in PIRLS 2016, including 50 countries and 11 benchmarking entities (e.g., regions of countries as well as additional grades or language groups from the participating…

Within the framework of the Testing Algorithmic and Application Skills project we tested first year students of Informatics at the beginning of their tertiary education. We were focusing on the students' level of understanding in different programming environments. In the present paper we provide the results from the University of Debrecen, the…

School readiness evaluations are becoming increasingly popular, and their implementation has become compulsory in an increasing number of kindergartens and schools in Hungary. In recent years, Diagnostic System for Evaluating Development (DIFER), developed by Nagy et al. has been used extensively for the diagnostic study of four- to eight-year-old…

The analyses presented in this report indicate that in several Member States (MS) 15-year-old students in vocational-oriented programmes (VET) perform better in digital reading than in print reading in PISA 2012. When differentiated by programme of study--VET versus general education programmes--VET students perform better in digital than in print…

This qualitative study describes and analyses young language learners' spontaneous comments while sharing picture books during EFL sessions. It also explores teachers' responses to learners' comments, and considers reasons teachers may choose to ignore children's talk in their first language (L1). Data were collected from young Hungarian learners…

For the first time, a pan-European study offers a comprehensive picture of reading literacy and identifies some of the key factors impacting on the acquisition of reading skills for 3-15 year olds. It addresses four key topics: teaching approaches, tackling reading difficulties, teacher education and the promotion of reading outside school. It…

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is an international assessment of mathematics and science at the fourth and eighth grades that has been conducted every four years since 1995, with the most recent assessment in 2011. PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is an international assessment of reading…

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8;0 and 21;11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension…