The National Scientific Students’ Associations Conferences (Országos Tudományos Diákköri Konferencia, OTDK) are held every two years. After the 2015 national conference, where Pázmány Péter Catholic University was the organiser of the Humanities Section, also reaping huge successes in it, thanks to our students (six first, 11 second and 10 third places), the next one will be held in 2017. That being far away, the faculty at the Institute are nevertheless glad to organise local rounds, called the Scientific Students’ Associations Conference (TDK), every semester. It was my pleasure to see that our students are already preparing: three of our Masters students doing research in teaching English as a foreign language registered for the local round this term.

The local round took place on December 4 in the Tárogató utca building, in front of the jury (Csilla Sárdi, Ágnes Rónay, Mariann Éder), the supervisors (Andrea Reményi and Zsuzsa Tóth) and a small but enthusiastic audience. Imre Fekete introduced us to his research in a secondary school English class on the relationship between blended learning and his students’ homework quality. Based on the students’ actual work, their feedback and his own reflections he concluded that although the quality of homework by students in the group was raised, the blended (offline and online) homework did not improve their learning awareness and responsibility. Ilona Ábrahám shared the results of her research in both secondary school and language school contexts on how various ways of vocabulary teaching result in differing success of students’ actual vocabulary in take. Anett Fellner is doing her research on teaching writing in English in a secondary school group. Her results indicate that the teaching of pre-writing strategies enhance the quantity, and probably also the quality, of the texts written by her students.

After the three presentations the jury retired for deliberation. They decided that the research and the presentation of all the three contestants were of equally high quality, valuable and noteworthy to represent Pázmány Péter Catholic University at the OTDK in 2017.

Ilu, Anett and Imre, congratulations!

Dr. Andrea Reményi

Source of Images: Piukovics Ágnes