Research results on mother tongue education in the schools with the hungarian language of instruction in transcarpathia (Ukraine)

From the perspective of minority ethnic groups – regardless of the country in which they live – it is of paramount importance under what conditions and through which methods they can learn their mother tongue (García, 2009; May, 2012; Sercombe & Tupas, 2014, etc.). The methods used to learn and teach the mother tongue can determine whether a speech community maintains its linguistic identity or undergoes assimilation. For this reason, it is a common phenomenon – especially in nation-states that promote a homogenizing approach – that the linguistic ideologies and educational goals represented by the state often differ from those held by the minority communities. And although the issue is fundamentally regional, its characteristics make it a general problem that also appears on the international stage. The present article uses the example of the Hungarian minority community living in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, to show the importance of the content of school education in preserving the identity of the community. One of the important conditions for the survival of the Hungarian community in Transcarpathia, apart from mastering its mother tongue, is a high level of proficiency in Ukrainian as the state language and in one of the lingua franca languages of Europe (e.g. English, German). Only through these can it preserve its linguistic and ethnic values and achieve the same opportunities as members of the majority society. In other words, language skills can be a means of avoiding segregation or total assimilation. This can be developed in the context of institutional education. In this paper, we will investigate the evolution of the contents of mother tongue education in the secondary schools with the Hungarian language of instruction in Transcarpathia, how up-to-date it is, how it considers bilingualism, and how the results of the scientific research among the community are reflected in the curricula, syllabi, and textbooks.