Grammar Practices in the Digital World

Abstract

Teaching and protecting Hungarian language and cultural values have become more and more challenging due to the fast spread of uncontrollable digital platforms. In their text-based digital products (e-mail, chat, blog, etc.), youngsters prefer elliptical expressions (digital slang) to grammatically correct sentences. Schools, course books offer a wide variety of opportunities to practise grammar, but students find these exercises rather boring and consider them as school chores. As students live in the digital world, teachers should consider alternatives to offering exclusively classical, paper-based exercises. The present work provides a subject-integrated approach, where paper-based course book tasks are converted into data management problems to practise grammar. This novel approach may enable students to become more engaged not only in solving the original grammar problems but also in finding digital solutions. Building algorithms helps them understand grammar rules, as well as differences between handwritten and computer-stored characters.It is also stipulated that our approach is open to generalization and suitable to solve similar problems in languages other than Hungarian.