For several semesters now, Erasmus courses have included a series of lectures in German entitled "Augewählte Teilbereiche der Logopädie: Kommunkation-, Sprech- und Spracherziehung in Ungarn", which provide comprehensive practical knowledge. Although, as the title suggests, the course was originally advertised to students who came to us on Erasmus scholarships, Hungarian native speakers can also take it as an elective subject. This semester, Dr. Rita Farkasné Gönczi, Dr. Angéla Imre, and Mária Sósné Pintye held interactive sessions. We always try to shape the content of the course so that the knowledge is as broadly related to communication as possible, but of course we also take into account the current interests of the students who have enrolled.
As an introduction, we learned about different methods of communication and discussed how important it is for people to be able to express their thoughts, both in their private lives and in their chosen professions, and how they can do so. Since everyone in the group is studying to be a special needs education teacher, effective communication is a fundamental requirement for our work. We then took a closer look at our speech organs and learned what we can do to keep our voices healthy for as long as possible.
In the first part of the second block of the course, the students discussed the steps and importance of early development. How can we most effectively support the typical development of children, and what can parents and professionals do to ensure proper language acquisition? Since most of the participants plan to work with school-age children in the future, the second part of the block focused on the process of reading, reading disorders, and dyslexia.
In the third block, course participants learned about the concept of easy-to-understand communication, its target audience, and its tools, and then practiced their newly acquired knowledge through text correction exercises. They then wrote a text on the use of bank cards using easy-to-understand communication methods, which was later translated into Hungarian and proofread by experienced Hungarian colleagues. As in previous years, the easy-to-understand content required to complete the course is available in German at the following link: https://konnyenertheto.gonczirita.hu/deutsch/texte/
We concluded the course with a joint Christmas celebration, where we evaluated our joint work with the help of games. The participants mainly emphasized the friendly, supportive atmosphere, which helped them the most in completing the course. The German students mentioned that they really appreciated the interactive tasks and the fact that we didn't just learn about different topics in theory, but could also try out together how a particular method, game, or task works. The unanimous wish of the Hungarian students was to have more opportunities to discuss special education in German and to work together with students from different countries. We, the course leaders, also really enjoyed these occasions. We would like to thank all the students for studying with us, and we encourage everyone to come and experience what it is like to discuss issues related to special needs education in such an international environment and good atmosphere at our university.