TEACHER TRAINERS’ BELIEFS ABOUT THE PLURICENTRICITY OF ENGLISH AND GERMAN Pilot results from two Hungarian universities

The present study investigates the beliefs of teacher trainers at Hungarian universities about the pluricentricity of English and German as foreign languages. The results of the pilot phase are based on the analysis of two semi-structured interviews with one lecturer each from two Hungarian universities from 2023. The analysis also includes a comparison of the results with 37 previous interviews conducted between 2020 and 2022 with 21 English and German teachers and 16 language learners in Hungary. The interviews were analysed using the Taguette software, in a qualitative content analysis framework, by setting up a coding frame with 13 codes. The main research question was how the university instructors’ beliefs about pluricentricity relate to those of the language teachers and language learners. The results show that there are far more similarities than differences, and that university instructors appear to be more open to pluricentricity than their colleagues in public education, but more conservative than language learners. The pilot nature of the study means that, in addition to presenting the preliminary results, I have also drawn methodological conclusions which will be very important for the continuation of the study, i.e. for the addition of further university instructors to the sample.