them through reading. For example, after a walk at the zoo, children may have many questions about the life, habits and biology of animals. They can fi nd the answers to their questions through reading relevant and in-teresting texts. The genres of the texts may be various, ranging from children’s encyclopaedias to books of poetry even. Knowledge gained from experience and from texts will thus complement each other and generate active learning.
This section has given a review of reading motives and the possible methods of their development. Strong reading motivation is not equal with the dominance of one motive. It is rather an optimally developed system of motives with multiple components, enabling adaptive adjust-ment to the environadjust-ment, here the learning environadjust-ment. Naturally, teachers have a key role in shaping reading motives (Józsa, 2007a).
de-velop the linguistic knowledge of students, and to shape and enrich method ically their oral and written language use.” (Művelődési Minisz-térium, 1978, p. 159).
In reading instruction in primary education, the emphasis was on the acquisition of the technical skills of reading, primarily facilitated by global methodology (the whole word method) at the time. The objective of teaching literature in lower secondary education was specifi ed as pri-marily aesthetic education. The curriculum treated reading ability as one of the elements of basic knowledge of the mother tongue. At the same time, it includes among the detailed objectives of teaching literature the development of reading aloud expressively and silent reading.
Assigned readings primarily included folklore, poetry, informative and journalistic texts, and of these, folklore, poetic and other literary pieces were emphasised in the detailed curriculum. The most important criterion for selecting compulsory readings was not the readability nor the diffi -culty of the texts, but their probable appropriateness with regard to top-ics which children fi nd interesting, suitability for the given age group, and literary, aesthetic quality.
The 1978 curriculum designated the development of reading skills and abilities primarily to the academic subject Hungarian language and lit-erature, but also sought possibilities of curricular concentration. Some examples for this can be seen in the sections for the integrated science subject (környezetismeret) and regular classes with the class teacher (osztályfőnöki óra). In the former, reading for information and library use were emphasised, whereas in the latter, the goal was to encourage the inclination to read.
The curriculum did not mention explicitly the roles of metacognition and reading strategies, as these were concepts still unfamiliar at that time. Nevertheless, the curriculum propagated techniques where compre-hension is checked against a pre-determined and narrowed-down meaning (e.g., students respond to questions in the textbook or prepare outlines).
The teaching of reading strategies and techniques such as scanning or skimming did not appear at the time.
The curriculum did not aim to develop reading motivation through the instructional methods of reading development nor through the texts as-signed, but through explicit discussion and review, which it specifi ed as one of the main goals of regular classes with the class teacher in every grade.
This is shown in the topics for these classes, which included such sub-jects as “we can learn through reading” or “the love of reading and books”.
The National Core Curriculum
The National Core Curriculum (NCC, Nemzeti Alaptanterv) introduced in 1995 featured remarkable innovations compared to the 1978 central curriculum. In contrast to the genre of the prescriptive curriculum, this new curriculum was a core curriculum: “NCC establishes common edu-cational objectives compulsory for grades 1–10 in every school in Hun-gary where compulsory public education consists of 10 grades.” (Mű ve-lődési és Közoktatási Minisztérium, 1995, p. 7).
As a core curriculum, the 1995 NCC defi ned cultural domains, one of which is Hungarian Language and Literature. It extends mother tongue education, a part of which is reading education, to cover the whole of the educational system. It specifi ed that mother tongue education is the task of each and every subject. The purpose of this was to provide “the basis for the native verbal culture and for literary education” (Művelődési és Közoktatási Minisztérium, p. 28). Its basic goal was “[to develop] sensible, expressive speaking, an ambitious use of reading and writing with the skills needed” (Művelődési és Közoktatási Minisztérium, p. 28). Accord-ingly, the 1995 NCC allowed reading development to be integrated into different academic subjects. At the same time, there were very few cases where objectives related to reading ability appeared among domain spe-cifi c objectives.
Texts intended for the development of reading were more varied than in previous curricula. In addition to continuous texts, non-continuous text types also appeared in the curriculum with both literary and non-literary genres recommended. At the same time, the presence of the tra-ditional approach was strong in the general developmental objectives, suggesting that the development of reading is to be achieved by reading literature, and within the academic subject of Hungarian language and literature. Regarding literary education, recommended literary pieces mostly belonged to Hungarian literature, and texts nearly a hundred years or even older were predominant among them. In this regard, relatively few new elements can be found compared to the 1978 curriculum.
Reading strategies appeared as developmental goals. Their teaching covered scanning, skimming and reading to locate information. The know ledge and use of some processes of text analysis that support learn-ing and thinklearn-ing abilities also appeared as objectives. Such processes include, e.g., locating specifi c information, identifying important points or recognizing cause and effect relations within a piece of text. The im-portance of the visual layout and environment of texts was also expli-cated. This also included the processing and understanding of pictorial and verbal information.
In the 1995 NCC, aspirations for the development of reading motiva-tion was mostly limited to the development of attitudes towards belles lettres, and appeared among the objectives of literary education. The cur-riculum defi ned the essence of literary education in making the reading of literature attractive and evoking the inclination to read. Other motives of reading, such as reading self-concept or interest appeared content-specifi cally, in relation to literature, as “openness to literary language”.
The 1995 National Core Curriculum was an advance in the develop-ment of reading. There was a tangible shift from reading as a conveyor of culture to reading as a tool for knowledge acquisition. In this docu-ment, reading was seen as a tool for learning, thinking and communica-tion in addicommunica-tion to fostering aesthetic and moral development.
The 2007 NCC (Oktatási és Kulturális Minisztérium, 2007) was mod-ifi ed at several points compared to the previous core curriculum, but it essentially preserved the view on the role of the mother tongue. The 2007 NCC attributed a double function to literature, i.e. as one of the main vehicles of culture on the one hand, and as a medium to develop the abilities of reading comprehension and written composition. There-fore this document declared the unity of mother tongue and literary edu-cation. At the same time, it viewed reading development as a continuous process throughout the school-years and its aspects surfaced in several cultural domains as developmental tasks.
Regarding the texts to be read, the 2007 NCC recommended reading various text types and genres, similarly to the previous core curriculum;
however, the criteria of complexity and the type of medium appeared as new elements in selecting texts. Improving the knowledge of genres can also be regarded as a new aspiration.
Reading strategies and methods of text analysis had considerable
pres-ence in the document, similarly to the previous core curriculum. Objec-tives related to metacognitive strategies were based on the assumption that strategies can be taught and learnt and do not necessarily appear without conscious developmental efforts.
Regarding reading motivation, the curriculum listed several activities that may facilitate the development of a reading motive (as well), i.e.
reading together, discussing the text read, debates, reading situations requiring cooperation, experiencing the social motives of reading, inde-pendence, student autonomy and the joy of reading. These can all strengthen the mastery motive. Expressing the need for engagement in reading refl ects the possibility of experiencing fl ow when reading.
Frame Curricula
From 2001 on, frame curricula have been functioning as intermediate regulators between the core curriculum and local curricula. Instead of cultural domains and educational phases, they defi ne developmental tasks by academic subject and grade. The frame curriculum takes the inte-grated development of language abilities and reading literature as an axiom, and does not consider developmental efforts in reading outside the reading of literature. Accordingly, the texts to be read belong to folk-lore and poetry and are of high aesthetic value. This is particularly char-acteristic of the preparatory and initial phases of learning to read, i.e.
grades 1 and 2. Functional genres and non-continuous texts appear among the readings from grade 3, although their frequency falls signifi -cantly behind literary texts (Oktatási Minisztérium, 2000).
In contrast to the 1978 curriculum, the framework curriculum put a great emphasis on syllabication in teaching the technical skills of read-ing; and students learn the technical skills of reading through the syl-labication method (a version of phonics). The framework curricula defi ne the development of reading skills, then reading ability, and reading com-prehension as a priority task up to the end of grade 6 and recommend the reading of everyday as well as literary texts. From grade 7 on, the em-phasis shifts from reading development to literary knowledge and to liter ary education, and the task of Hungarian language and literature classes is the transmission of lexical knowledge, culture and aesthetic
education. The shift in emphasis may have created the mistaken belief that developmental efforts targeting reading ability are completed in grade 6 and no further development is necessary.
The development of reading motivation in the framework curriculum is confi ned to subject-based contents. The framework curricula explicate only the motivation for reading literature, however, among learner ac-tivities they still list a few which strengthen certain content-independent motives. The education of readers aims to direct the natural curiosity of children towards reading and to give them self-confi dence in reading.
This overview of curricular documents reveals that Hungarian national curricula have been advancing towards the contemporary paradigms of reading development, and they consider reading as instrumental know-ledge necessary in learning, thinking, and everyday life.