Régi magyar múlt időkkel kapcsolatos ismeretek, tapasztalatok és attitűdök középiskolás diákok körében

Knowledge, Experiences and Attitudes Towards Extinct Hungarian Past Tenses Amongst Secondary School Students In my paper, regarding the History of Hungarian, I was researching on what kinds of attitudes secondary school students have regarding dated past tenses. The rich system of past tenses of the Old Hungarian Period has shrunk to the one “-t(t)” suffix in today’s Hungarian. However, when learning about Old Hungarian manuscripts as well as literary texts, students meet these almost extinct perfect, continuous, and narrative tenses which are hardly included in the curriculum. I was trying to understand whether these dated tenses are known, recognized, and understood by the students. I was also interested in their attitudes towards the tenses they have to decipher with the help of their language skills and existing knowledge. This paper shows that there is a great amount of uncertainty as well as inconsistency among students when they have to understand these forms, however, when they are given specific texts, they think about the communicative functions of the given tenses in a very creative way. Secondary school students are likely to give voice to their opinion not only regarding extinct forms but regarding today’s usage of tenses, too. They are trying to give explanation to the possible reasons why this system of past tenses became virtually extinct by today. Also, they are using their own foreign language learning experiences in the process. This questionnaire-research is also trying to find connections to relevant questions regarding teaching the mother tongue and foreign languages.