This study is situated within a male-dominated Palestinian-Israeli reality rife with issues of gender privilege. With a purpose to disrupt the status quo in my language classroom and positively affect students' beliefs towards gender injustices, I, as a teacher researcher, designed a unit on gender issues including a book set that would challenge…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

The current study examined the proficiency of Israeli adolescents in reading single words in English, which is taught as a foreign language, and what language skills predict individual variability. Parallel measures of word reading, phonology, decoding, morpho-syntax and vocabulary in Hebrew and English were administered to 217 adolescents in 8th…

The present study is an examination of the contribution of bilingualism to trilingualism, namely the influence of learning two different orthographies on learning a third. The participants were two groups of sixth graders from Israeli schools who were studying English as a foreign (second or third) language: Russian Israeli children for whom…

The controversial oral English Bagrut examination is seen as a means to prepare students for their written Bagrut exam, specifically to encourage the active use of the English language. (LB)

The question of the sequencing of skills is an important issue in language policy and curriculum design in general, and even more so in the case of a diglossic language such as Arabic. This paper tries to investigate the implications of diglossia on the order of linguistic skills acquisition in Arabic among Hebrew speakers in Israel. (JL)

Two experiments tested whether the orthography of readers' first or second language affected their reading time and comprehension in each. English and Hebrew bilingual graduate students and faculty read texts translated into both Hebrew and English. The English native speakers read the English texts significantly faster than the native Hebrew…

One of the main problems Israeli language planning has focused on is the linguistic integration of newcomers and of not-so-recent immigrants whose linguistic adaptation has been slow. The bodies active in this are the Section of Adult Education of the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Absorption, and the Jewish Agency for Israel.…

Writing instruction in Israeli high schools is discussed based on classroom observation and practices. Meetings between English teachers and teacher trainers specializing in foreign language writing focused on techniques such as prewriting, dialogue journals, revision, and peer correction. (16 references) (LB)