Abstract:

In cultures that have literacy, orthography is part of the social norm and of the standard in language use.

It is a regulated way of writing based on public agreement and regarded by the members of a particular society as a guide to the production of writing. Knowledge of orthography is also a measure of the level of literacy in 21st century Hungarian society; the mistakes of those who make spelling errors are seen by many as a sign of a lower literacy.

Since Hungarian is an agglutinative language, the transformation of morphemes into words in writing follows a complex system of orthography rules. Teaching orthography has traditionally been the task of the native-speaking subject. It is the task of the public school system to master the rules of normative written representation of the common language. In teaching spelling, the goal is for the learner to move from the level of the external algorithm – the level of awareness of the rule-based connection of morphemes – to the level of the internal algorithm – the level of skill (Orosz 1974; Antalné 2001).

In this article, the principles of Hungarian spelling are presented (MHsz 2015; Vladár 2017), and a specific Hungarian form of teaching is described: the structure and aims of the annual Hungarian spelling competition for Hungarian-speaking pupils of 5th-8th grade living in Carpathian Basin, and phenomena causing problems in the competition are presented (cf. Vidákovich – Czachesz 2001, Csaba – Domján 2017).

Based on the analysis of the results of the 5th-grade students (N = 3,340), the study indicates that:
1) learning spelling does not only consist of learning algorithms,
2) the problems caused by insufficient reading comprehension can be well illustrated by the analysis of the mistakes made in the competition.

References:
[1] Antalné Szabó Ágnes 2001. Írás – kultúra – felelősség [Writing - culture – responsibility]. Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó. Budapest.
Csaba Mercédesz–Domján-Koncz Eszter: Munkamemória és helyesírás [Working memory and spelling]. Anyanyelvpedagógia 2017/2: 16–27.
[2] MHSz 2015. A magyar helyesírás szabályai [Rules of Hungarian Spelling and Ortogrpahy]. 12. kiadás. Akadémia Kiadó, Budapest. 2015. [Online: https://helyesiras.mta.hu/helyesiras/default/akh]
[3] Orosz Sándor 1974. A helyesírás fejlődése az általános iskola 5. osztályától a középiskola IV. osztályáig [The development of spelling from the 5th grade of primary school to the 4th class of secondary school]. Tankönyvkiadó. Budapest.
[4] Vidákovich Tibor–Cs. Czachesz Erzsébet: Egy helyesírás-vizsgálat tapasztalatai [Experiences from a spell check]. Iskolakultúra 2001/3: 37-50.
[5] Vladár Zsuzsa 2017. Nyelvészeti ideológiák a szóelemző helyesírás mögött [Linguistic ideologies behind word analysis spelling]. In: Kuotny, Ilona–Kinga Piotrowiak-Junkiert–Pawel Kornatowski–Németh, szabolcs (eds.) A hungarológia ma: nyelvészet, kultúra és oktatás. Bibliotheca Hungarica V. Poznan, 7–48.

Keywords:

Orthography, Hungarian language, reading comprehension.