The Research Participants and the Process of Purposeful Sampling

To initiate the study, the background questionnaire described in Section 3.3.3 was administered to a larger population of students from two secondary schools in Cluj county, in the North-Western region of Transylvania. In one of the schools, the language of education was Romanian. This school did not offer to its Hungarian minority students the possibility to study certain subjects in their L1. All subjects were taught in Romanian. The second school was an educational institution belonging to the Hungarian community. There, the language of education was mainstream Hungarian, thus the students had the possibility to study most of the subjects in their L1. At this school, the students studied both Hungarian language and literature and Romanian language and literature as part of the curriculum. It has to be mentioned here that both schools placed special emphasis on the study of foreign languages. The printed out questionnaires were handed out to the students by the students’

form teachers, after consent for conducting the study had been obtained from the two schools’ managerial groups. The main aim of the questionnaire, as already mentioned, was to identify those young multilinguals who met the criteria set for purposeful sampling and to gather background data, such as languages known and used, habits and preferences of using languages, and reading and writing in their different languages.

Some 50 questionnaires were handed-out; however, only 28 were returned. Based on the information gained from the respondents to the questionnaire, 12 young multilinguals were invited to take part in the study. The participants’ ages ranged from 15 to 18. There were nine male and three female participants. Parental consent was obtained for those participants who at the time of the study were legal minors; that is, they were younger than 18. Six participants were attending the secondary school where the language of education was Romanian. The other six participants were attending the school at which mainstream Hungarian was the language of education. All 12 participants were fluent in both their L1 Transylvanian-Hungarian and L2 Romanian; that is, they were using both languages with a native proficiency.

At this point it has to be mentioned that in the present study, mainstream Hungarian and its regional variety, Transylvanian-Hungarian, are not considered separate languages in the sense of the diglossic relationship described by Ferguson (1972). Diglossia, first, entails a hierarchy between two language varieties, one socially invested with higher prestige than the other. In addition, the two languages within the diglossic link have markedly specialized use within the speech community (Ferguson, 1972). Neither of these characteristics apply in the case of Transylvanian-Hungarian and mainstream Hungarian. Albeit, Transylvanian-Hungarian includes some archaic words, such as “lyceum”, meaning secondary grammar school, which have become either obsolete or are used sparsely in mainstream Hungarian, and in certain educational contexts, for instance, during the Hungarian literature and language lessons, mainstream Hungarian is usually preferred, there is no subordination between the two language varieties and their use within the Transylvanian society is not markedly specialized.

Transylvanian Hungarians rarely refer to their language as Transylvanian Hungarian, and, albeit they are aware of the existent lexical differences, they do not regard these as dividing criteria. Thus, based on this, the participants were considered Transylvanian-Hungarian L1 and Romanian L2 fluent bilinguals, and not Transylvanian-Hungarian L1, Hungarian L2 and Romanian L3 fluent trilinguals. Furthermore, henceforth the terms Transylvanian-Hungarian and Hungarian are used interchangeably, and only when characteristics special to only one of the varieties are discussed are the names Transylvanian-Hungarian and mainstream Hungarian used.

Based on the information collected from the background questionnaires, the participants’ profiles were constructed and are presented in Table 4. It can be noticed that the six participants who had attended the secondary school where the language of education was Romanian formed a more homogenous group in terms of both languages studied and time dedicated to the study of particular languages. In the column which presents information about the context in which the participants’ particular foreign languages were used, the term formal refers to the educational context.

Namely, the code formal was applied to the use of a particular language for school-related purposes, such as the completion of academic assignments and communication during lessons. The term informal refers to contexts separate from the educational context, or to out-of-school contexts, such as writing emails or messages to friends or playing computer games.

These contexts are important scenes of language use, but were coded informal because of the lack of the formalisms imposed by the educational context. The imbalance between the formal and informal contexts is evident at individual level. Some participants reported that they used only English in informal contexts (one exception is participant B.A., who was using German in informal contexts), while their other foreign languages were used only in formal contexts, that is, for school-related purposes.

Table 4. Transylvanian-Hungarian Participants’ Profiles Based on Questionnaire Data Transylvanian-Hungarian Participants’ Profiles Based on Questionnaire Data

Note. The abbreviations and sign are M: male; F: female; Rom: Romanian; Hun:

Hungarian; Fr: French; L: Latin; +:and. The participants’ names have been reduced to initials to provide for anonimity.

Furthermore, the imbalance between the formal and informal contexts is also visible across individuals. Only eight participants, out of the 12, reported that they used one of their foreign languages in informal contexts. Connected to the context of language use are the columns of reading and writing in different languages. Reading and writing can be viewed as modes within the larger frame of language-use contexts. They were included in the questionnaire because they mutually influence the ability of making meaning in general and are crucial factors in lexicon and language development (Neisser, 1976; Vygotsky, 1934). The Reading in languages column was compiled based on the participants’ choices of the following statements in the questionnaire:

In the case of English and other foreign languages:

• To read books, newspapers or magazines, and texts on the net In the case of Hungarian and Romanian:

• To read books, newspapers or magazines, and texts on the net, and

• To read the compulsory literature.

The compilation of the Writing in languages column took into consideration only writing that occurred in informal contexts, that is writing emails. The other types of writing were those that took place as requirements for completing school assignments, such as doing homework or composing texts in different genres.

The remarkable things in regard to the information contained in these two columns are the lopsided use of the reading and writing modes within the same language. For example, some participants, both from the group attending education in Hungarian and from the group attending education in Romanian, read in Romanian only the material in their course books (see participants H.B., K.J., and F.L.), but used Romanian for both formal and informal writing. Likewise, some participants reported that they did not read in English beyond the English course book (for example, participants K.J., and P.F.), but they used English to write in informal context (i.e., emails). A contrary situation is that of the participant who read in English beyond the texts in the course book but did not use English to write in informal context. It has to be noted as well, that the participants used their other foreign languages, that is French, German and Latin, only in formal contexts, namely in educational settings.

A last remark connected to the language/use profile of the participants is their use of bilingual dictionaries. The last column in Table 2 reveals that all participants reported that they used the Romanian-English dictionary, even those who attended education in Hungarian. What is even more remarkable is the fact that even those participants relied on the Romanian-English bilingual dictionary who reported that they did not read in Romanian (see participants K.J. and F.L).

To complement the participants’ language profile and to get a more nuanced profile of their English L3, they were asked to complete the Oxford Online Placement Test®. At the time of the study, the test was free of charge. The 12 participants’ scores obtained in the test ranged between 35 and 44 on a scale of 50, and their mastery of English was evaluated to be B1, or intermediate, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.