Eszter Tarsoly

Senior Teaching Fellow in Hungarian

Eszter Tarsoly started her employment with UCL SSEES as a Teaching Fellow in Hungarian language in 2007. She obtained a BA Honours Degree in Hungarian Language and Literature, General Linguistics, and Language Teaching Methodology, combined with a Postgraduate Certificate in Secondary Education in 2004 from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and an MA degree in Central and South-East European Studies from UCL SSEES in 2005. She complemented her BA with a Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA).

Eszter's interest in teaching Hungarian in the UK and in researching Hungarian language acquisition among speakers of English goes back to her undergraduate years when, in 2003, she was an Erasmus scholarship-awarded visiting student at SSEES, and studied approaches to, and methods of, teaching Hungarian within the British higher education system. Since then she has been a contributor to Hungarian language and literature classes as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant at SSEES, while also working on her doctoral thesis, with the supervision of Dr Daniel Abondolo, on linguistic purism and attitudes towards language in Hungary and in the circum-Pannonian region.

Prior to her teaching appointment at SSEES Eszter taught Hungarian to speakers of other languages (mainly English and French) since 2001, when, still an undergraduate student, she took up part-time employment with a language teaching and translation agency in Budapest. While studying for her MA, she taught Hungarian at the London Hungarian Reformed Church Community Weekend School and as a home tutor for adult learners. Eszter is currently examiner for the ECL (European Consortium for the Certificate of Attainment in Modern Languages), which offers the only Hungarian language exam widely available in the UK, and which is administered by the University of Pécs, Hungary.

Eszter has developed a good working relationship with the Hungarian Cultural Centre and takes part regularly in organising joint events between the Hungarian Subdivision of the ECL Department and the Cultural Centre. She is involved not only with language teaching but also recruitment and promotion activities, and is a regular presenter at the Language Show at Earl's Court Olympia.

Eszter's research interests include, besides the project on linguistic purism she undertakes as part of her doctoral thesis, bilingualism, language acquisition versus language learning, and how typological features of languages influence the process of language learning. Between 2001 and 2003 she participated in an ELTE (Budapest) research project which examined Hungarian - Romanian bilingualism in Romanian Moldavia, exploring the intergenerational transmission of Hungarian as an additional language in a minority context.

This page last modified Friday 17 February 2011.