ADRIAN HATOS, School Performance and Language of Hungarian Ethnic Pupils

One of the thorniest issues of the linguistic policies in North-Western Transylvania was the establishment of linguistic arrangements in the mandatory education system. Supported also by arguments which refer to the equal opportunity rule, native language education for ethnic minority children, concerning especially the Hungarian language, has flourished both in mixed schools, and in schools that are segregated in terms of the teaching language. This article assesses the effects that the various linguistic contexts in which a Hungarian teenager in the region studies can have on his/her performance in school, compared to the performance of his/her colleagues who study in Romanian. I start from two hypotheses: linguistic shortcoming and opposition culture. The hierarchical linear regression modeling of the average of school results scores in the seventh grade, on a sample of over 3 700 pupils in the eighth grade in Bihor County, indicates a significant and systematic disadvantage of Hungarian pupils, although small as an absolute value, irrespective of the linguistic arrangement. Moreover, both the linguistic disadvantage thesis and the opposition culture model can be supported, although the results are not conclusive from this point of view.