School of English and American Studies - Eötvös Loránd University

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The current volume of WoPaLP  presents six research articles from a variety of themes ranging from discourse analysis in academic writing and assessment systems in Hungarian higher education to teachers’ handling of controversial issues in their teaching.

Ágota Szűcs’s choice of topic is justified by the fact that the role of formal schemata in summary writing has not been thoroughly investigated, especially in the context of Hungarian tertiary education. The significance of this article may help explain why supervisors (and readers) of BA and MA theses often struggle with thesis scripts whose authors are supposed to be able to produce good quality professional writing, but who still experience difficulty in writing well-structured texts.

Ármin Kövér’s article compares the topical structure in abstracts from published articles in the field of literary studies with those from applied linguistics. It might be argued, of course, that such differences were predictable, but Kövér’s article highlights that written work in a specific field is a reflection of the specificities of that field and that writing successful articles demands knowledge of how texts ought to be constructed in that field.

Rita Divéki goes beyond the conventional prohibition of “PARSNIP”-type topics, suggesting that teachers are obliged to handle controversial issues (CI) in their teaching because, although they are risky, they still offer a possible change to everyday classroom routine and moreover, they are part of Global Citizenship Education, something that the Hungarian government itself is committed to including in the National Core Curriculum. Divéki’s research is focussed on what the respondents’ attitudes were towards CI, what considerations, termed background variables, teachers engage in when they decide about specific CI, and what exactly these CI are, based on an internet-based questionnaire.

Both Gergely A. Dávid and Katalin Piniel and Katalin Hubai and Ildikó Lázár deal with assessment practices that flesh out (or should do so) government regulations and laws. Dávid and Piniel describe the design and introduction (in 2011) of thesis marking scales and rating procedures at ELTE. The research was a mixed method design, planned with careful attention to validation from the start: members of staff contributed in various ways towards what was to be evaluated and what feature appeared at what level in the scales. Hubai and Lázár employ a comprehensive approach in their overview of assessment in Hungarian education. On the basis of a close reading of a wide selection of national documents, Hubai and Lázár present information about established practice(s) in school assessment and teachers’ attitudes to assessment, providing a detailed description of the circumstances that contribute to the current situation in a variety of Hungarian educational settings.

Beatrix Price investigates professional English teachers’ organisations, their lives and the motivation of their leaders on the basis of the “possible selves” theory. The discussion of leaders’ motivation includes the double-edged nature of support from the outside, what the voluntary nature of their work entails in terms of obligations, how such voluntary work can be done sustainably as well as the problems of leaving a legacy and the passing on of leadership to younger generations of teachers.

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the members of the Advisory and Editorial Boards and especially to all our external referees, who always offer their time and expertise so selflessly to evaluate and comment on the submitted manuscripts, and whose work guarantees the continuing high standards of WoPaLP. We are very grateful for their work. Thanks go also to the authors of the articles; without their ideas, conscientious research and efforts in writing up the articles we could not offer these good reads to our readers. We hope you will enjoy this new volume of the journal.

We wish you happy reading!

The editors