The Gifted and Gifted Education in Hungary

The real challenge is to see value that is not yet in its true form. Becoming gifted is a process, during which characteristics of giftedness are present throughout, but not necessarily in a form perceptible or acceptable to the environment. Giftedness does not hide itself, only to the extent that the environment believes it hidden. Perception defines the pattern that manifests itself. The beginning of the 20th century is a success story of Hungarian gifted education. Outstanding teachers and their students have reached outstanding achievements through gifted education linked to everyday education. Their methods and ideas are durable, and are therefore worth recalling

Dynamic Assessment of Narrative Competence

In Developmental Education, language plays an essential role as a tool for communication (and thinking). Learning to produce coherent messages (“narratives”) with both cultural and personal value in the context of meaningful socio-cultural practices is considered as an important goal of Developmental Education. Narratives are essential for human action as they function as a tool for giving meaning to reality. Therefore, close observation and assessment of children’s narratives is essential in the context of Developmental Education. Over the past years we have developed a Dynamic Assessment (DA) instrument for assessing children’s narrative competence. This instrument combines two common approaches to DA, namely standardised interventionist DA and interactionist DA. With the help of this instrument, teachers are able to gain insight into children’s actual narrative competence as well as their developmental potential and their receptivity to certain forms of assistance to reach this potential. Our experience up to now shows that it is possible to assess children’s narrative competence in a valid and reliable manner

Toward a unified functional account of structural focus and negation in Hungarian

The goal of this paper is to provide a unified analysis of the function of various types of (structural) focus and the negative particle (used preverbally) in Hungarian. It is argued that the function of these elements (each inducing the inversion of verbal modifier and verb) is best understood with respect to the interpretation assigned to the verbal predicate in different contexts. By treating the verbal predicate as a schematic positive declarative clause (or “proto-statement”) in its default interpretation, it becomes possible to define the function of the elements concerned in terms of the kind of relation in which they stand with the proto-statement, the kind of relation in which the overall symbolic pattern (as a Gestalt) stands with the unmarked positive declarative clause type