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RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The objective of the research is to understand how the ethnic composition of the family and the choice of the language of the school are related. THE RESEARCH PROBLEMS AND METHODS: Minorities are often the subject of research, and within, bilingualism, language use arenas and state language education are prominent topics, how‑ ever, the issue of ethnic minority students studying in majority institutions is relatively unexplored. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: Our research is focused on the ethnic Hungarian minority in Romania, their decisions and their experiences of education in the majority language. The present qualitative research was carried out in a semi‑structured interview format in November 2023 with 14 respondents, reached by snowball method. RESEARCH RESULTS: Our results show that, in addition to proximity to the institution and the increased possibility of doing well in the country, the school experience of parents and older children are factors behind the decision made by parents. Nevertheless, we also find that extended family, even the third generation, has an impact on school choice. CONCLUSIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS AND APPLICABLE VALUE OF RESEARCH: The research presents a perspective that focuses on the educational results of respondents most of whom proved to be successful in their respective fields. The results we found confirm hypotheses from the literature regarding the language choices of different nationalities. The research is a part of a larger project which aims at the exploration the research upon the students attending non‑native language schools.

Writing after the failure of the 1848 Hungarian revolution, József Eötvös, himself a prominent politician and novelist, grappled with the sources of the failure and conditions of success of social and political reforms. In his monumental work, The Dominant Ideas of the Nineteenth Century and their Impact on the State, he proposed that in order to understand the behaviour of the masses and design social and political reforms that will have popular support, one needed to understand the meanings people assigned to popular ideas—as opposed to meanings assigned to them by theorists. Popularity, in this approach, had three components: ideas around which people rallied, emotions that connected them to these ideas, and actions people undertook in their name. The way towards understanding these components was to understand the culture of the people in its various manifestations, from popular religiosity to literary and material culture. By re-reading Eötvös’s work focusing on his conception of popular ideas, this paper investigates how the longstanding tension between popularity and the distrust in populism was articulated in a classic of nineteenth century central European political thought.

El presente artículo estudia la distribución de palabras y colocaciones presentes en un corpus de lecturas graduadas del español a través de los distintos niveles de aprendizaje. El objetivo principal es verificar si se da una correlación entre la frecuencia léxica tal como se registra en un corpus del español general y la distribución de los elementos del vocabulario (formas univerbales y pluriverbales) en textos de diferente nivel, de manera que los elementos infrecuentes sean más numerosos conforme el nivel sube. Esta correlación no se puede dar por supuesta en las lecturas graduadas en español, pues un repaso a la bibliografía relevante indica que se ha dado prioridad a factores distintos a la selección del vocabulario en la creación de este tipo de materiales (en concreto, al componente gramatical).

The students of today have mostly grown up surrounded by numerous digital technologies, like cell-phones, computers and the internet; therefore they are called digital natives by some scholars. These information and communication technologies are indispensable parts of their lives. The digital gaps which are caused by the (different) use of digital technologies are socially relevant primarily in school, as they influence the inequalities in education. In our article, we present the possible approaches of digital inequalities in school, the gap between teachers and students and the differences among students. We introduce the concepts and theories about the digital natives then sum up the main criticism about this thesis. Recent empirical studies and their results are presented to argue in favour of the heterogeneity of the digital native’s generation.

The aim of our article is to analyse the generational differences of ICT access and utilization by presenting the first results of a recent sociological research which was carried out with four different age groups at the beginning of 2012. The paper focuses on the similarities and differences of ICT (computer, internet and mobile phone) access and use of the generations. First of all, we provide the theoretical framework of the analysis by introducing the definitions and literature of the ‘digital gap’, the ‘digital inequalities’ and the ‘digital natives’. In addition to the discussion of the mostly descriptive results of the research, we follow the concepts of digital gap and digital inequalities by first showing the differences of ICT access, then that of some other aspects of ICT use – the place, the autonomy, the intensity and the aim of use – between the generations. As far as the differences in access are concerned, the socio-economic characteristics of users and non-users are considered. The analysis confirms that ICT access and use differences correspond to the generational discrepancies. On the one hand the results show that the most typical characteristic of non-users is their high age. On the other hand we have found that even the members of the young generation – the so-called digital natives – constitute a rather heterogenic population in regard of the different dimensions of ICT use. Further analysis is needed and planned in order to reveal the causal relations behind the results found.

Quaternary slope deposits near the Lesse river in the Famenne region, south Belgium, contain scattered rounded rock fragments (5-15 cm diameter) that are typically characterized by a dark coating or patina. This dark surface resembles rock varnish occurrences. To establish the nature of the coatings, chemical, mineralogical and petrographical analyses were performed. The coatings are essentially Fe/Mn oxide features, developed as surface deposits on the rock fragments with associated impregnation of the rock substrate. The Fe/Mn compounds are amorphous or at least poorly crystalline. The coating also shows enrichment in clay minerals compared to the matrix of the covered rock fragments. Some of these characteristics are typical for rock varnish, but the coating does not show a layered structure. We hypothesize that the coating was formed by precipitation of Mn and Fe supplied by water, after burial of the rock fragments in the surrounding slope deposits, and was not affected by atmospheric deposition. Despite its strong macroscopic resemblance to rock varnish the patina on the Famenne rocks must most likely be classified as a heavy-metal skin.