The Debrecen Summer School has held its yearly evaluation within the framework of a press conference. Dr. Péter Szaffkó (Director), Dr. Pál Csontos (Study Director) and Emese Pogány (Hungarian teacher) talked about this year’s achievements as well as their plans for 2012.
The popularity of Debrecen Summer School is unbroken. As the Study Director Dr. Pál Csontos informed, about 400-500 students had come when they had summer courses only. But due to newly introduced autumn and winter courses, the number of students has exceeded 1200 last year.
The most popular courses were those of dealing with history.
One of the most important innovations of this year was taking a role in the training of university students who pursue a career in teaching Hungarian as a foreign language. From this year, in accordance with an agreement with Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, would-be teachers studying at that institution can do training practice at Debrecen Summer School.
As far as their plans for next year are concerned, they will offer more compact and homogeneous study groups at courses launched more frequently through the academic year. Partly treading in the footsteps of their ”brother” language school in Budapest, the Debrecen institution will also offer regular, intensive, and super-intensive courses practically each month. In addition to this, the spring and fall semester courses will remain on schedule. The programs launched in venues abroad (Oradea, New York, and Antwerp) will be expanded, as will the list of the so-called thematic courses, which cover various aspects of Hungarian culture (history, music, theater, ethnography, etc.).
